The folks at HyperX sent us a professional gaming headset for review that apparently has 7.1 surround sound in it. Do they work? Let's find out. I'm a big fan of using surround sound systems while playing video games. If you've ever played Grand Theft Auto 5 with a surround sound system you probably know what I'm talking about. The way that entire game is set up feels like you're in the actual universe, hearing the car speed by you, the music coming out of your sound system in the actual game world out of your car and just the sound effects around you really add to the experience of playing that game. I've always felt that that kind of immersion of 5.1 or 7.1 surround was only done by actually having speakers around you. Now your typical surround sound system looks like this, you've got a center speaker, a front left and right speaker, back left and right speaker, for 7.1 you have a middle left and right speaker and then the point 1 means subwoofer. So somewhere in your room you have a subwoofer that's just adding to the bass notes and it really does add a lot of sound and texture to any game that you're playing. But headphones technically can't do that because they only have two speakers left and right. But this headset right here, the HyperX Cloud 2, promises to do everything that a surround sound system does and more because it does 7.1 in a very small package.
I really like the build quality of these headphones. Right away I noticed that it wasn't a lot of plastic on them which is nice. Every gaming headset I've ever used has this hard plastic exterior for the band and they usually snap over time which I really hate. These use a genuine leather exterior here and metal band on the inside and that's nice because every time you expand it they don't feel like they're going to break. It feels great on the ears and even if I'm playing a game for like five hours with this headset it doesn't hurt at all. A lot of gaming headsets that have that hard plastic stuff it just hurts your ears after a while. These ones don't they're very comfortable and very well made. Also the line that comes out of the headset and including the line that comes out to the USB card these things are braided so no matter how much you bend them they're not going to break. Which I really like. This is a super high quality headset and honestly I wasn't expecting it to be this good.
You can use the headphones like regular everyday headphones with a 3.5 inch audio jack that comes out directly from the headset. But what you can also do is plug up this USB sound card that's included in the box which emulates 7.1. Now I've tried this out on a number of games to see if the 7.1 sound actually worked and to be honest it really didn't. It sounds great don't get me wrong and when you turn on the 7.1 effect it makes everything just sound a lot better but it didn't really emulate 7.1 authentically. Even if I closed my eyes and had some kind of sound effect in the distance I couldn't really tell where the sound was coming from which is something you can do with a real surround sound system. So while it does emulate the effect it doesn't actually do real 7.1. Every time I was playing any game I always kept the 7.1 sound on because it just sounded better but if you didn't like it you can just turn it off by clicking the middle button on the remote.
One sticking point for me with gaming headsets has always been the microphone. Now while some gaming headphones have the ability to kind of hide the microphone into the body of the headset itself it usually sucks because they're made of plastic and like I said earlier the plastic breaks. But with these headphones here you have a little slot at the bottom where you can insert the microphone separately. This is really nice because that way you can use these headphones as a good gaming headset but you can also use them as regular everyday good sound quality headphones. Now one thing I am going to mention is that these headphones are really good at cancelling sound around you so you really can't hear that well when you've got these headphones on. If you're out in public and you're walking around on the street you probably don't want to use these because you're going to get hit by a car. Otherwise though if you're relaxing in a park or something like that use these headphones and the world around you just melts away.
So at the end of the day these headphones are really good. They're great headphones to listen to music with and great headphones to play games with. But at 7.1 they really don't do anything special. It's just a virtualized effect that doesn't actually do what a real sound system would do. So you're kind of getting shortchanged in that aspect. When I play 5.1 games now sometimes I just prefer using these headphones because they just sound that good. Especially when you’re using the USB sound card and the 7.1 virtualized effect. But remember if you're looking for something that's going to replace a sound system you have to look somewhere else because while these are great they are not 7.1.
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