Razer Kraken USB

The Razer Kraken USB is a gaming headset headphone designed and engineered in California (USA) and manufactured in China in 2014 by the Hamburg (Germany) based Razer Corporation. You can use it with Windows 8/Windows 7/Windows Vista, Mac OS X (10.7 to 10.9), and Playstation 4 (PS4). The software, known as Synapse, including the drivers can be downloaded from the Razer Kraken website. The main feature of this gaming headset is the positional audio technology, also known as immersive virtual surround sound that creates all-around 360° sound through the 32 mm Neodymium magnet drivers. The published frequency response is 20 Hz to 20 kHz, impedance 32 Ω, sensitivity (at 1 kHz) 112 dB, and output power 30 mW. This headset has a 2 m long rubber sheathed cable terminated by a gold plated USB plug, and the complete headset including the wire has a mass of 250 g.

Review

These headphones are of course very useful if your computer did not have a sound card. After repair, I plugged them into the USB port of my old Windows 7 machine and straight away it detected the device, installed the necessary drivers, and I began listening without having to configure anything, which was impressive. The sound quality was very good and there was plenty of bass and treble making me wonder how it would sound with one of my Walkmans. Unfortunately it is not possible to use it with a cassette player as it does not have a jack plug! However their virtual positioning audio technology is quite impressive and I could hear virtual sounds appearing to come from different directions.

The headphones were extremely comfortable to wear and the soft ear pads made a good seal around my ears thereby almost completely isolating me from the outside sounds. The headband size was also correct for my head size as I did not have to extend them. This was just as well as the plastic extendable part of the band (of my pre-used headphones) was broken on one side but still usable if the broken part was not extended. In this headset, the unidirectional analogue microphone is at the end of a flexible boom that can be bent to almost any position.

There is a table on the box comparing the Razer Kraken USB with Razer Kraken 7.1.

Price/eBay

Razer Kraken headphones are always extremely popular and even a broken unit is sought after. When I was on eBay I saw some headsets with broken headbands for sale and I managed to get one that was otherwise in good condition in its original box. In this unit, one of the wires within the cord was also broken and consequently it was exhibiting the typical device not recognized issue when connecting to the USB port.

In this design, the plastic extendable part of the headband is an integrated piece with the ear cup, hence a replacement would involve changing the complete ear cup. Unfortunately, it is not possible to get this replacement; hence a unit with broken headband will not be of much use and worth. However, a unit with a broken wire is much easier to repair since one can simply replace the USB plug, or the complete cord if necessary, hence, this is worth keeping in mind when buying. I disassembled these headphones for cleaning and repair and also fitted a new USB plug and wire and got them working. This multi-page article might be useful if you need to repair yours as it shows the wiring and pinout.

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