My Favorite New Budget Headset Finally Showed Up At Retail

HyperX Cloud Stinger 2, Where Are You?

Photo taken by the author.

Normally, when HyperX launches a new product, the Target and Best Buy locations in my area stock it almost immediately on release day. Way back when I would take an occasional company-provided review unit, as was the case with the Cloud Orbit S, they even shelved and sold the final product before the review embargo I signed had expired.

That was frustrating.

Now, I find myself missing that old HyperX urgency. No one nearby stocked the Cloud Stinger 2 at release — a brilliant headset that I think is one of the best budget models in a long time. You can read my original review of it here. I saw the headset launch online early on in October, and waited a few weeks for it to show up at retail, expecting I’d be able to pick one up easily so I could review it.

It never showed up, so I was forced to order one online to sate my curiosity. But I kept monitoring the local retail situation anyway just for kicks. The Cloud Stinger 2 family has three different models, a smart step downwards from the roughly 8 thousand models in the previous generation, so I thought that surely at least one version would show up at one of my local stores before too long. They’d have to stock them before the lucrative holiday season…