Member-only story
The Best-Sounding Gaming Headset You Shouldn’t Buy
Gaming headsets are, by definition, a combination of a pair of headphones and a microphone for chatting. The new Razer Barracuda Pro does the headphone part better than pretty much anything else on the market — and gets the microphone disastrously wrong.
I bought this product at retail with my own money. I wasn’t asked by Razer to write this nor compensated by them in any way.
Razer’s Barracuda Pro (official site here) is the new flagship headset in their refreshed Barracuda range, and the most premium gaming headset they sell right now. This family of products first launched last year with the budget Barracuda X, which has also seen a refresh as part of this new lineup. The Pro goes for $250, the standard THX-less Barracuda for $159, and the cheaper X for $99.
To justify the Pro’s premium price point, Razer packed in features. The core audio system is powered by THX’s AAA amp technology for low distortion and superior audio quality. It connects via either a 2.4ghz high speed USB-C dongle or Bluetooth 5.2, and you can switch between both sources by double pressing a button on the right ear cup. The headset has full powered Active Noise Cancelling, with a solid forty-hour battery life and quick USB-C charging. And instead of a boom microphone — it uses the ANC mics built into the ear cups to capture your voice.
This is a huge design mistake, and it’s further exacerbated by the implementation. As the noise cancelling system and the voice chat system share the same mics, turning both of them on destroys the audio quality of the headset. The Barracuda Pro can’t cancel out sound and capture your voice at the same time since it only has one set of microphones for both tasks, and as a side effect your sound loses all bass and becomes a tinny mess if you try to do these things at the same time.
I don’t know why Razer lets users do this. I don’t want to automatically ruin the sound on my nice gaming headphones any time I use voice chat. You can manually get around this by disabling ANC before chatting — but the…
