Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and review of the Razer Kraken now when you look at the build quality of these headphones alone you'll sit there and go wow really it only costs $300 yes $300 is extremely expensive but what Razer sought to make with these headphones was their first truly audiophile grade headphones so when we open it up we find a nice little letter welcoming you to the cult of Razer and no driver disk because unlike many high-end headphones from gaming companies these are not USB which I've always felt is a real problem with high-end headphones from gaming companies is that USB sound cards just really aren't very good and most audio files are going to have better solutions on their own so Razer has gone ahead and implemented a fully pure analog high-end $300 headphone here it comes with an awesome card carrying case that has kind of a leisure leather ish outer material to it the individual headphones are hand assembled you can see that they're not forgetting their gaming roots here they do fold up to make them a little bit more compact in the case and they open up with a nice little satisfying snap there they are made out of machined aircraft-grade aluminum with animal-friendly leatherette which is actually among the best leatherette that i've encountered there's leatherette that feels like plastic stretched over foam and then there's leatherette that actually feels like oh yeah okay if you weren't telling me that this is leather I'd have had a much harder time figuring out that it is there's a supersoft thick coat of foam on both of the ear pads as well as on the headband this is something that just gets overlooked too much on headphones look at that nice wide head been because distribution of weight is important and nice padding on the underside of it now with that said when I say distribution of weight I am NOT talking about a trivial amount of weight here folks because of the aluminum construction they are not particularly lightweight they've got 40 millimeter neodymium drivers in each ear cup and only 32 ohm impedance so that means that they'll be usable not only on your gaming PC with your more advanced audio solution but also on something like a smartphone or whatever well and for that reason razor includes two cables one that's just a straight vert well it's K it's a smaller I think this is a two and a half mil two three and a half mil two detachable cable and then the other one which is replaceable with the other one now this is getting confusing two cables one that just goes to three and a half mil for just headphones on a second that's a 4-pole so it supports both headphones and microphone and then finally eraser also includes a nice little three and a half mil two quarter inch adapter I mean if I just told you what they look like then I wouldn't really be doing my job here would I so first I adjusted them to my head which has a very satisfying metal adjustment mechanism like I said guys these are built like headphones that cost several times as much they're extremely comfortable look at this I'm going to show you guys a quick demo here so I'm going to push these in and you're going to see how much plushness there is before the things even touch my ears then I burned them in for about 36 hours just putting them on the back of a chair and running my music library on medium to high volume continuously once they've been broken in a little bit I fired them up using an objective 2 amp /o dak combo unit so that I have a nice reference audio source and then for my comparison testing I used my AKG K 701 s my Denon a HD 600 s my Bayer dynamic DT 770 Pro 80 ohms and my Sennheiser Momentum's which all cost between 200 to 320 dollars on Amazon as of today now guys to be clear I'm a top 40 listener so let's get this out of the way flax mp3s some obscure format you rip all your music - if you listen to pop or that style of music with upper range male vocalists or female vocalists and there's any bass in the song honestly the clarity is not really there in the mid-range and is masked by bass that I just don't feel is tight enough to call punchy but feels more like what I would describe as boomy all of this is especially problematic for me when I compare them to other sort of bass head approved products like these Sennheiser ie 80s that I've been listening to a lot lately if you don't like IMS of course you don't like I am so those are completely off the table but it's just something I have to think about when I go well these are also available for about $300 okay but Razer knew all of this when they created the product so just like hammerhead which I did not find to my tastes this is not aimed at my tastes when I handed my hammerheads off to a friend of mine who loves beats and Skullcandy products and loves lots of bass he was like yeah these are awesome because it was a step in the right direction towards better audio reproduction but with a sound signature that he enjoyed so what I did was I changed gears and asked the audio subform on - tech tips comm for some playlists to hopefully let these things shine I ended up with some electronic music with heavy bass lines lots of drums and the like and they definitely sounded better but any time vocals came into play they really did feel like they were being overwhelmed somewhat enough music though how do they perform for gaming if you're going to test a product from a gaming centric company like razer i guess you'd better play some games you know what the gaming experience actually gave me some significant additional insight into the way that these headphones were tuned of course a gamer centric company like razer if you're buying $300 headphones from them wants you to have a great music listening experience but they also want you to have a great gaming experience and explosions sound great gunfire sounds great the gaming experience on them is great I guess I if I had a complaint about these headphones at this point it would be that I wish razer had created them from the get-go as a gaming headset and put a proper microphone on them rather than just giving us an inline that would have added for me to the value proposition of a $300 pair of headphones that really handles only a certain genre of music well but handles gaming extremely well I mean you could make the argument that most folks spending $300 on headphones might just be willing to pony up for a better microphone solution such as a blue snowball anyway and you would be able to make a very solid case for that but with their closed design so that means that sound doesn't really leak in from the outside and doesn't really go out from the inside as well as their great performance in gaming and great performance in basing music I just wish they were being marketed as more of a gaming headset ok so this is the conclusion part normally I don't really talk about pricing much because I you know it can fluctuate but these are expensive headphones and headphones don't really tend to chain so we're going to factor in that these are $300 headphones so let's start with the build quality these are the best looking and feeling headphones that I have laid my hands on in anything close to this kind of a price range I would go as far as to say that they are the best you can get for $300 they justify the premium that razors commanding for them with that said they're a little bit too heavy to call the comfort the best but the comfort is still a very strong point of this headset and the reality of it is while the materials are nice and plush and soft and they're very comfortable to wear for an extended period of time they're made of aluminum so there's nothing you can do about the additional weight they definitely sound better than anything else from razors lineup so if you like the razor sound signature and you just want more of the same these are going to be a fantastic choice for you but on the other hand if you're you know a discerning audio snob that seeks flat frequency response curves then I really think you're going to be sorely disappointed by these headphones but the reality of it is you guys knew that already razor has a characteristic sound to them so I don't really know why you're even still watching this video at this point so guys go ahead like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you think that you know if you're a discerning audio snob or if you prefer a more bassy experience and let us know how you feel about it so I'll know what to tell you guys in future videos about these sorts of products and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips