Please Don’t Sleep On The Razer Kraken X
Budget Products Deserve Original Designs
Razer is a massive player in the gaming peripheral industry, and their large fanbase and level of success means they’re often highly scrutinized.
That’s totally natural and good. We should hold the big players to a higher standard on all fronts.
The original Kraken gaming headset was never known as a pillar of audio quality, but it was wildly popular, and helped create the now-gigantic gaming headset market that has multiple aisles to itself inside every Best Buy.
And it also brought us RBG lighting on headsets.
I loved it, in spite of its boomy thick bass, many different overlapping models, and plastic-y build. It was a fun headset and came at a reasonable price…and also had a $300 aluminum “Forged” edition.
That boomy, slightly garish Kraken still casts a long shadow over Razer’s many different audio products. I think it’s the main reason that people still view gaming headsets as bloated bass monsters, even though that’s not really true any more.
Razer themselves shifted directions starting with the Kraken Pro V2. It offered a much stronger build, comfier fit, and a more balanced sound profile with just enough thickness in the bass to remind you just a little of where it came from.
But in the budget headset market, it’s been a nightmare wasteland until very recently.
Traditionally, the accepted way to make a budget gaming headset was to take your standard $99 model then cut as many features and parts out of it as you possibly could until you got the price down.
This lead to a lot of thin plastic nonsense from companies like Turtle Beach…and also bland products like the Razer Electra V2, the worst Razer product I’ve ever personally experienced.
Shudder.
Fortunately, things have now completely shifted in the low-end headset space. Two years ago, gaming companies started crafting original designs out of new parts, but geared towards a lower price point.
And the market is so much better for it.
HyperX made the bespoke Cloud Stinger at $50, breaking away from the Takstar OEM model they’d so long relied on. Astro followed suit with the exceptional Astro A10. Corsair brought it with the HS50.
Razer was clearly watching all of this, biding their time, and waiting for just the right moment to try this themselves.
The result is the new Razer Kraken X, which I believe is one of the most exciting products that they’ve made in the audio space since the original Kraken.
I loved it in my review, and I’m still using it regularly. No, it doesn’t have the crazy metal headband of the Astro A10 or a removable cable, but it does have wonderful comfort and an exceptional microphone. And decent sound, with just a little of that old magic Razer thickness.
It’s exciting because it shows that Razer actually listens to the market, and to their fans. It shows that they’re willing to adapt to new trends. They spent some of their considerable R and D budget crafting a new thing around a low price point for once, instead of just recycling old parts.
And the inclusion of the new version of Razer Surround makes it a compelling value proposition.
I believe that tech companies should be called out when they do something questionable, but I also think they should be recognized for doing something right.
The Kraken X could have totally been a Kraken V2 with plastic instead of aluminum, and it still would have reviewed well.
But Razer went the extra distance and spent money on designing a budget product, just like everyone else.
That they’ve given in to this emerging trend means it’s now officially the new norm, since they’re one of the largest players in the business, and we should expect more original peripheral designs from now on regardless of price point.
I’m looking at you with mild disdain, Logitech. And no, the new G Pro X doesn’t count as a new design no matter how much you tell me it does. It sure does seem like a re-hash of the same borrowed-from-HyperX headset design that Creative used for the older H5 tournament edition but with your custom drivers inserted.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just use your eyes!
Copies can still be great, but they’ll never be as fun or as exciting to me as a wholly-original design.
If even Razer will now spend the money to do that for a $50 product, there’s no longer a great excuse for borrowing so heavily from the past.
