Ooh, a Barracuda.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Razer's back with another one
of their hostile fish headphones.
This time it's named Barracuda.
I do have history with Razer.
I bought their 7.1 Megalodon headset
that used military grade sound simulation
to get 7.1 surround sound.
And it blew 14 year old me's noggin.
Let's look at the box for a second.
So one thing that I've always found
kind of funny about Razer
is that they've always seemed like a marketing company
that decided to make technology,
which is why like every single thing they have
is just like, it's branded to the tits.
Like we have THX, Achromatic Audio Amplifier.
We have Razer Triforce BioCellulose 50 millimeter drivers.
Triforce?
Razer Smart Switch Dual Wireless.
So basically what Smart Switch Dual Wireless is,
is that you should be able to switch
between 2.4 gigahertz,
two gigahertz or Bluetooth.
That's cool.
It just doesn't need a brand name.
You know, it just,
it doesn't have to be called Razer TM Smart Switch.
Just call it Smart Switching or whatever.
So this is the flagship
of Razer's whole Barracuda family refresh.
They have the Barracuda X,
which is the lowest tier at 100 US.
Barracuda at 160.
It's weird to have Barracuda X be cheaper, but whatever.
And then the Barracuda Pros all the way up at 250 big ones,
which,
I know you're pushing into some pretty ambitious territory
at that price.
They do have hybrid ANC,
which is good because I feel like if you're going,
if you're a wireless headphone
and you're anywhere in the $200 range and you don't,
even probably $150 range are up and you don't have ANC,
it's unacceptable now because like you just should have it.
It's kind of not that hard to do.
It's not, it's hard to do really well,
but it's an easy feature to add.
I like the classy presentation though.
One thing that's kind of a disappointment
is that this is a, this is big.
Here's my laptop.
I know, but the banana is a less useful.
Can I?
Whoa!
What the?
So for context, in your backpack full of bananas,
it's going to take up a lot of space from your bananas
because that's three and then like we're too tall.
So that's one, two, three, that's two,
that's six whole bananas worth of volume.
That's insane.
Lttstore.com.
In here we have a USB to a, USB-A to USB-C,
a graded cable with cable tie.
What's the point of these?
I hate this.
Oh, I just get tired of this.
They sell them with like graphics cards and HDMI cables.
Maybe they're really, really helpful for shipping.
I find them annoying.
This is another extension cable for USB-A.
Quite a lot of reach, but that's great.
Yeah, because if you're going to use these
plugged in with your computer,
this might not be quite long enough
if you're trying to reach all the way around
to the back of it.
This probably will be.
That's everything that's in here.
Ooh, there's a little, there's a little guy.
Oh, this is there.
Wireless USB-C adapter.
You can use this with your Android phone.
This would be for when you're using the smart switch.
So instead of using Bluetooth,
you can use their smart switch
to use their high speed 2.4 gigahertz connection.
So like what you-
Or on your laptop.
Or on your laptop, or on your PlayStation.
PC PlayStation, it says.
It says right there.
What about Xbox?
Ah, get Xbox.
So here are the headphones.
I like the way they look.
I know Razer's known for being
pretty gaudy and very aggressive with their branding.
These are pretty subdued.
I do actually like the green accents.
Build quality is, it is all plastic.
It's neither here nor there when it comes to headphones.
You can get more expensive headphones
that are also all plastic.
You can get cheaper headphones with metal.
We got our power button.
This is like a volume control wheel.
We have our mute switch for the microphone.
Is there no boom microphone with this?
I guess not, we didn't see one.
And then this is, I believe their smart switch button,
which is on the left ear cup.
These, are these on?
Oh, now they're on.
They weren't on.
So they actually have really good ceiling.
I took them off thinking that maybe the ANC was on,
but these actually have a really good seal.
I can barely hear anything.
This headband doesn't, it seems a little,
the curve's a little harsh.
It felt a little weird on the top of my head.
Sometimes I was just getting used to stuff.
These are very soft in their leatherette.
These aren't, they're fake leather.
They're pleather and memory foam.
It's a lot of empty space.
It's pretty soft memory foam.
I'm not very impressed so far for $250.
Let's power these on.
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Let's connect it.
This is the worst.
Do you see why?
Look at my choice.
You're blocking other ports.
Yeah, that sucks.
You could use yet another dongle
or you would just use this, I guess.
But like, it's nice having your adapter,
but sometimes, you know, you go and you're like,
you're in between a game.
You just got downed and you go,
oh, you know what?
I'd like a little sneaky snack.
And you just get up and leave your headphones on
so you haven't missed anything.
It's sticky, sometimes you get hungry playing your games.
So these have hybrid ANC,
which use both feed forward and feed back ANC.
Basically it listens to both the,
what you're hearing on the outside,
as well as what it's hearing on the inside
to get a more accurate representation of the audio
that's surrounding you.
This is the same kind of tech that Apple uses in AirPods Pros.
And it's kind of the gold standard for ANC at the moment.
So they have three modes.
They have ANC off, ambient, which is a listen through mode,
and they have ANC on.
I appreciate that because ANC can shift the sound
of what you're listening to.
And I don't wanna have to choose between ambient mode
and ANC, like some headphones do that.
I just, sometimes I just want the ANC off.
So press to turn, you just press this button on the right,
the quick switch button to turn it on and off.
That sounds really,
bad.
That sounds really atrocious.
I'm gonna turn the ANC off.
Literally the ANC just killed it.
The ANC just like made it sound just so much worse.
It's literally,
it's literally canceling out its own bass response.
Like it's like the ANC just makes it sound like a tinny mess.
It sounds like you're listening to like a phone speaker.
Yeah, so that's good to know
that the feed forward is working.
It's just blocking off my, the sound I want to hear.
I, okay, I can't be dunking on them too hard
because I do have to,
have to download their software
to assess anything that they make.
Oh, and if you couldn't,
if you couldn't tell that I wasn't stoked
about having to use software,
I'm not stoked about having to use software.
Oh, this is so annoying because what you do is that
they give you a list of like,
here's all the things you can download
or to install from the Synapse software.
There's five things.
And if you don't select one of the things,
an ad pops up asking you to install it.
I don't want game booster, system booster and game rewards.
I don't want Razer Cortex.
I want Synapse and THX.
I want THX spatial audio.
Razer, Razer, what are you doing?
The issue is that they try hard at the wrong things.
They try really hard to maintain this great image.
And then they have mediocre software,
annoying implementation, lackluster hardware.
And like, they still haven't really resolved their issues
with reliability and longevity on their peripherals.
It sucks because I think that what Razer does
a lot of the time is cool,
but it feels like they just do it
to put another label on the box.
It's taking a really, really long time to download.
Oh, it's updating the headset.
Yeah, so we spent about 15 minutes just waiting around
for the headphones to update.
And it said, factory reset, powered off.
And now it's telling me to unplug
and then replug the wireless dongle.
But here's what doesn't make sense.
Why did I waste all that time waiting
for it to wirelessly transmit when I have a cable?
This is USB-C and for the headphones.
It could have happened so much faster.
My dongle's been updated.
Oh, we're still installing Razer Synapse.
Still installing Razer Synapse.
We're only at the top.
We're only at 20%.
Oh!
Wait, only 20%?
We updated the headphones.
They couldn't do it at the same time?
No, of course not.
It's Razer.
It's not supposed to be good.
It's supposed to be cool.
We'll see if the update's fixed any of those ANC issues
I said where it was canceling out its own audio.
It seems like the AC sounds a little bit less aggressive
and is having less of an effect on my music.
Yeah, so either the update fixed the problem
because the ANC is not cutting out the bottom end
nearly as badly.
I do kind of want to just like traffic noises
because I want to get some better
because it's kind of quiet down here.
I want to get some better semblance of how good the ANC is.
And so we're just going to blast traffic noise.
Ambient is working as intended.
Let's go to ANC.
It's not amazing.
It's not incredible, but it's not terrible either.
When you have the music playing,
it cancels out noise well enough.
Sign in with my Razer ID.
Could I just end this painful existence instead?
I have to log in to use THX Spatial.
Razer, it's so frustrating.
It doesn't, I don't need an account
to use headphones with my computer.
Stop telling me to sign up for stuff.
Hello there, you're currently using a guest account
where all settings are anonymous to us
by using our software.
Yeah, that's the point.
This is the fifth time they've asked me
to log into my account
and I'm just trying to open the software.
Just waiting for DM Eternal to load up.
Again, the ANC, I don't know.
It is through this wireless thing.
The ANC is like, maybe it's something that can be fixed
in Windows, maybe it's another setting,
but the fact that it's like a gaming headset
is having such a profoundly bad experience
on a PC platform is really disappointing.
I play with a pair of AKG K7XXs,
which are open-backed headphones
that have a really, really good soundstage.
These are not doing anything special to me.
Doom has a pretty decent audio engine,
like for spatial audio.
I usually like testing it with stuff like Left 4 Dead
because I always loved the positional audio in that game.
It's not special.
These aren't special.
Razer has done it again.
They've released a product
that's too expensive and pretty bad.
Razer, I wanted to love you.
I continue to want to love you,
but you continue to be,
yeah, you continue to be you.
Like, if they don't start focusing
on delivering quality products,
then I do think that they're actually
just gonna fall out of favor
and no one's gonna ever care about them.
If you're spending $250 on headphones,
you deserve better than this.
Don't buy these.
Thanks for watching this video.
If you're thinking, hey,
I want some mediocre sound quality.
Well, how about you save your money
and spend 1 6th the price
on like some Nord Buds or something.
You can check out my coverage of the OnePlus Nord Buds
just down here-ish in the video ending boxes.
The ShortCircuit box, yeah.