 🎵 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 disc, 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 audiophiles 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 leatherish 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 leatherette, I'd have had a much harder time figuring out that it is. There's a super soft, thick cushion 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 headband 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 else. And for that reason, Razer includes two cables, one that's just a straight... There, well, okay, it's a smaller. I think this is a two and a half mil to three and a half mil. It's a 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, and then a second that's a four pole, so it supports both headphones and microphone. And then finally, Razer also includes a nice little three and a half mil to quarter inch adapter. But 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 two amp slash ODAC combo unit so that I have a nice reference audio source. And then for my comparison testing, I used my AKG K701s, my Denon AHD 600s, my Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro 80 ohms, and my Sennheiser Momentums, 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. Flacks, MP3s, some obscure format you rip all your music to. 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 basshead approved products like these Sennheiser IE 80s that I've been listening to a lot lately. If you don't like IEMs, of course, you don't like IEMs, 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 dollars. 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 subforum on linustechtips.com 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 anytime 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 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 bassy music, I just wish they were being marketed as more of a gaming headset. Okay, 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 change much. 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 Razer is 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 Razer's lineup. So if you like the Razer 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. Razer 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.