This review is of a pair of HyperX Cloud II headphones provided by HyperX for review purposes.

Intro

When I was a kid, walking through a bookshop while my parents were looking for some boring grown up book, I stumbled across the humour section and happened to pick up a comic called “Something under the bed is drooling”. I flicked through a couple of pages and it seemed pretty funny so decided to spend the few bucks it cost and buy it. 25+ years later and that initial comic I got has long since been read to death. As has every single other Calvin and Hobbes collection I could lay my hands on. A few years back now, I bought the complete collection in hardcover and I still read and enjoy them regularly. Even my kids now have started reading them and they love them.

You may wonder why on earth I’m going on about a comic from my youth in a review of a gaming headset. Keep with me through this review and I’ll explain myself, but the one thing I can say is that to me, it’s entirely relevant.

I’m a really happy guy this month. I love audio stuff and this is my second review this month on a gaming headset. This time I’m looking at the HyperX Cloud II headset. HyperX is a well-known brand, but for some reason they’ve never been front of mind for me when I think about equipment for my rig. I’ve never had a bad experience with them. It’s just that other companies marketing departments I guess have done a better job of competing for space in my head to make me think I must have their kit.

I don’t entirely know why this is. HyperX has been a brand for 14 years and they sponsor a bunch of eSports teams (maybe that’s the problem, I’m too old to follow eSports) and have well reviewed high performance memory and SSD’s. To me though, when I think gaming equipment, the first names that spring to mind are Corsair and Razer with various other gaming brands behind them. HyperX isn’t normally a brand I even think of and dismiss. Well, that has been my loss, as you’ll find throughout this review.

Sound and Hearing Brief Intro

The Cloud II’s are wider range than what I refer to as standard 20-20 headphones. The frequency response ranges from 15 Hz to 25 kHz. Most headphones concentrate on the 20 Hz to 20 kHz range as this is generally accepted as the average range of hearing that most humans have although this varies from person to person. Additionally, the range tends to start wider and reduce as we age. What you may see advertised as “high definition audio” is sound that will often include frequencies outside of the standard 20-20 range.

In ideal conditions, the range can increase, but being reasonable, very rarely will most of us use our headphones in what could be considered “ideal conditions” (think commercial recording studios, sound testing labs etc).

Many of the “high definition audio” headphones which you’ll see advertised with ranges from single digit Hz to 40+ kHz (100 kHz for the $55,000 priced Sennheiser Orpheus headphones!) are good headphones, but generally you’ll find most companies tend to at a minimum split their focus from providing higher range headphones to increasing the quality of the range that most people can hear.

Couple all of this with the fact that I still know a lot of people who listen to mp3’s on their phones rather than any of the lossless audio formats and you may be wondering what the point of these high range headphones are.

On the off chance that you’re not aware of how much you lose in the conversion to mp3, I encourage you to go and check out:

http://theghostinthemp3.com

where you can hear a recording of the sound lost from the original test control song in the development of the mp3 standard. Hint, you lose a surprising amount of sound.

Back to the headphones.

In The Box

Opening the box, we find:

The Cloud II’s

Detachable microphone

The 1.1m braided cable with analogue standard stereo/mic 3.5mm jack.

The inline remote/sound processor with another 2m braided cable to a standard USB connector.

An airplane adaptor plug! (Didn’t realise they still existed!)

Carrying bag

Spare felt earpads (the installed pair are leatherette)

Instructions etc.

Everything is packed away nicely and the box is reusable to put everything back in its proper place easily which I like. Pulling the gear out, it all feels solidly put together and high quality. The buttons on the controller have a very nice feel to them and all in all it feels kind of like the impression I have of HyperX as a company. Not front of mind, but a good brand which makes good quality kit.

The Cloud II In Action

My last headset review was my first proper written audio equipment review and in preparing that review, I decided on my control set for audio testing.

First up is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony #6, Allegro Molto Vivace (opening few minutes of the third movement) as recreated by Herbert Von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in 1964. This very quick, delicate and precise instrumental section I’ve found over the years has had the ability to show the muddiness and lack of precision of quite a few sets of expensive, high end headphones.

The slightly bass heavy headphones which I tend to prefer are often shown up when listening to this piece because they tend to lack the precision needed to give a decent rendition of the sound, but I’m genuinely surprised and impressed that the sound comes through very well. This isn’t just saying that they sound good for a pair of gaming headphones (which, let’s face it, are often lacking when it comes to serious audio reproduction), I mean that they genuinely sound good. As in proper decent audio quality headphone standard good. No doubt about it, this is a very impressive beginning from the Cloud II’s.

Next on the sample list is Eddie Van Halen’s Eruption. This ode to the electric guitar is also quite a precise piece but requires a very different poise from headphones than the first selection. The minimalist drum intro followed by Eddie letting rip on the Frankenstrat culminates in about one and three quarter minutes of pure rock guitar nirvana.

The Cloud II’s here are again impressive. I feel really obligated to point out. They aren’t just good for a pair of relatively inexpensive gaming headphones. They are genuinely good. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a bit of a preference for slightly heavier base than what audiophiles would consider to be proper reproductive sound and these headphones deliver that in droves, but lose none of the precision that cheap, bass heavy headphones tend to give up.

Crank the volume and the sound remains consistent and impressive.

The 53mm drivers deliver good punch which is needed for the song and the slight leaning to the bass end of the spectrum helps on the drum/bass guitar intro before EVH and the Frankenstrat let rip in solo mode. Once again, I can’t help but be impressed here. The precision

Now an absolute personal favourite. Pink Floyd’s Echoes from their Meddle album is an amazing piece. At just over 23 and a half minutes, it’s also one of the longer songs I regularly listen to, plus it has the added bonus of being one of the few songs where the winamp visualiser really makes sense. It’s a great song for testing audio equipment through several different kinds of music. On top of this, it gives me an excuse to put on the headphones and tune out the wife and kids for a while (shhh, don’t tell!)

The song comes through brilliantly. I don’t even look at the visualiser and just sit back with the headphones on for close to half an hour of audio bliss. The Cloud II’s are rapidly becoming my favourite headset. Even to the point that I’d consider taking the mic out and using them as normal headphones which is something I’d never consider with most of the other gaming headsets I’ve tried.

Time to try some games.

Alien Isolation is a great game. Perhaps even more important for the purposes of this review, it’s a great game which also has great sound, and that’s what I’m after here. The Cloud II’s do a great job of giving you the dark brooding environment that you need to play it and once again I’m left feeling very happy (or scared!) at the outcome.

But A:I has something that nothing else I’ve tested thus far offers. Multi-channel audio. Time to put this virtual surround to the test. I find a doorway and spend a good 5 minutes activating it from all sorts of different directions, walking forwards, sideways, at an angle etc into it and letting the door open and activate. The results are as I expect. Which is to say decent, but (as is always the case) my search for really good multi-channel audio in a headset will continue. That much said, the results are certainly fairly comparable to my Razer Tiamat 7.1’s (my daily driver for gaming, so far…), but as with all multi-channel headsets I’ve tried thus far (actual and virtual alike) the results are wanting when it comes to proper positional audio, particularly from directly behind.

Plugging the Les Paul in and firing up Rocksmith 2014 is going to be fun. I’ve only just gotten back into Rocksmith after breaking my wrist skiing last season. I actually managed to restrain myself reasonably well in the Steam Christmas sales last year. That was until I saw all the Rocksmith DLC they had available on sale too! £35 and a bunch of songs later and a lot of them are still unplayed (as a lot of my steam library is!). Time to try something new then. An old favourite, The Doors – Roadhouse blues. I’ve not played the song before so it’s throwing me in at the easiest level and giving me perhaps one note in five or ten to play. Even with so few notes, the learning curve is there. I stumble through the first song with a 79% hit rate. More importantly, the sound from the Cloud II’s is once again spot on. For good measure I try to enable the virtual 7.1 mode and see what it sounds like but quickly revert. This is 2 channel audio and it doesn’t sound right.

All that remains is a quick blast into Star Citizen with some mates for some TeamSpeak/Discord testing. Other than the usual complaints about my aim, flying, lack of target callouts and generally bad co-op play style, there are no complaints about the sound from the microphone and the in game sound itself comes across well.

Non-Sound Factors

So it’s clear to say that I like the Cloud II’s from an audio perspective, but what about non-sound quality factors? Well, there are a few points to note here.

First, I need to have the earcups extended to the maximum amount of space available for them to fit comfortably. I measure the distance from the centre of my ears over the top of my head and come up with 15.5 inches (or a little over 39 cm). Most headphones I’ve tried which pass over the top of my head I don’t need to extend to the maximum to make fit. The band which goes over your head has a soft memory foam padding and probably has another cm or so to give before it starts becoming noticeable.

The microphone is on a flexible extended arm which has a nice resistance to bend around and extends about 6 inches (15cm) from the base of the left ear.

The remote/USB sound card is a nicely put together affair, better labelled and higher quality than some I’ve seen from competing offerings. It also has a clip on the back which was useful for me to put it out of the way when I was playing the guitar.

It took a bit of jiggery pokery in windows to get the system putting out sound from both the speakers and the headset but I found a good explanation here which worked for me in Windows 10 with no problems.

Wrapping Up

The Cloud II’s are rated at less than 2% Total Harmonic Distortion (THD). In simplistic terms, this is how accurate the equipment is in reproducing audio and how much the sound can be distorted (or mangled) from the source material. In the realms of audiophile equipment, that’s distinctly pedestrian with many mid-range surround receivers giving less than 1% THD, high end stuff gets into 0.01% territory.

But I’m comparing the Cloud II’s here to equipment that costs 10x the price (just for a mid-range surround receiver, source player, cables and speakers are extra!), and at the high end costs 100x the price or more. The point here is that most gaming headsets I’ve used don’t even list THD on the spec sheet! I feel pretty confident in telling you that’s not because their THD performance is excellent. The fact that HyperX even list theirs is kind of a statement of intent here. Nobody is going to be comparing these to a fully kitted out Meridian home theatre system, but at the same time, they’re significantly superior to any other gaming headset I’ve tried thus far.

That does bring me to a small consideration which some may want to take into account. I plugged the USB into my PC and expected some configuration software to be installed. None was. I took a poke around my machine in all the locations I could think of to find audio configuration settings etc. Nothing really to be found. They are recognised as HyperX 7.1 audio and they… Just… Work…

Part of me feels a small sense of loss at this. In years gone by, I’ve owned equipment made by Harman, Arcam, Meridian, Yamaha, Sonos, KEF, B&W, Bose, AKG and the list goes on. Ultimately I like to tinker a bit with things and play with settings. That’s why I’m a PC gamer. The Meridian kit was great for that, except when it wasn’t. Plug a laptop into your home theatre kit and play about with settings, until you mess it up so badly you have to sheepishly call up the place you bought it to send one of their engineers out and fix your messed up config! That’s what got me thinking. The Arcam kit was actually some of the best I’ve ever owned. No drama, no millions of whizz-bang knobs and dials and buttons etc. Just smooth understated performance that worked and you were in awe of. I’d still like some software to twiddle with audio settings for the HyperX, but in all likelihood, I’d probably play with it and make it sound worse. Still, If you want to tweak settings and fiddle with options, the Cloud II’s are probably not for you.

For reference, my normal ear/headphones are:

Razer Tiamat 7.1 gaming headset on the PC.

Sennheiser IE80’s for my normal daily listening.

Bose QuietComfort 25’s for flying.

It’s fair to say that these are all more expensive than the Cloud II’s and I’d not consider replacing the IE80’s or QC25’s with the Cloud II's, but what about the Razer?

And here is where I’m slightly shocked at the conclusion I’m coming to. I genuinely prefer the Cloud II’s. Despite no sound tinkering options. Despite no real physical multi-driver arrays per ear. I don’t know how it works. I paid more and I got less. The Razers are decent, but multi-channel audio in headsets (at least within my experience) still isn’t there yet. Both of these headsets make a good attempt at it and positional reproduction is pretty reasonable in both, but both audio quality and comfort levels are significantly higher in the Cloud II’s.

Multi-channel audio in headphones has always been a bit of a tricky thing anyway. I’ve still yet to find anything that really recreates the soundscape of a proper 5.1 or 7.1 channel system with speakers placed around you. Some are trying to do this differently with OSSIC for example sailing through its kickstarter funding for a new HRTF headset and others attempting to do something similar with binaural audio. I’ve yet to try OSSIC and binaural audio is impressive but still leaves me feeling like it’s not there with regards to a proper surround sound experience.

So now I come back to my introduction. Just what was the point of my Calvin and Hobbes ramblings from yesteryear? Well, I was really struggling to think of the last thing I’d bought that was genuinely amazing value. Then it struck me. That comic book I bought so long ago, it was so cheap and yet I got so much enjoyment out of it. I don’t want to use the word cheap because that has some negative connotations to it, but the value it provided for the price was genuinely amazing. The Cloud II’s are the same and at this moment in time, they are without a doubt my favourite headphones for gaming and general PC usage.

Reviewed at $97.94 (Amazon US) and £69.99 (Amazon UK).

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