I purchased these headphones from Microcenter a little more than a year ago. I was looking for wireless headphones with good range, good battery life, and suitable for work calls and gaming with my friends. Do they stand up to the task?

Pros

Range is good, I can go to a different room or floor in my house without the signal dropping in either direction. The battery life is incredibly good. I haven’t tested whether it meets HyperX 300-hour claims, but I do know that I go for weeks without recharging this headset. This is undoubtedly helped by aggressive power-gating; the headset will power itself off automatically if it senses you idling for about 10 minutes. It seems to do this by sensing head motion, for example if you set the headset on the table and walk away it will turn off. It doesn’t turn itself off if you’re wearing the headset and just not playing media, however.

Sound quality is great and there’s no noticeable latency. I don’t feel like I need to mess with the EQ on these for games or media, it’s pleasant out of the box. The wheel for volume adjustment is a nice touch, it’s easier and faster than the buttons you would find on other headsets. I really like the red light on the microphone that illuminates when you mute yourself. This is very helpful for when I need to remain in a work meeting and might need to speak, but I need to leave my desk for a moment. I also like that I can continue to use the headphones even while they are plugged in and charging.

Cons

My first impression of the headset was unfortunately less than good. I had some problems with the microphone being incredibly quiet to the point that my friends in Discord and work calls couldn’t hear me unless I was screaming in to the mic. This may or may not have been related to the HyperX NGENUITY software. I ultimately decided to uninstall their software because it didn’t really add much value, and at some point my microphone problem seemed to resolve itself. It’s been working fine and perfectly audible ever since then.

The battery life “announcer” is consistently wrong. For example every time I turn on my headset it will tell me “Battery level at 100%”, and it will continue telling me this every time I turn it on until the battery is dead. The only time I get an accurate battery reading is if I charge the battery partially and then turn it on, for example to 70%. Then the aforementioned problem repeats… it’ll always say 70% until it’s dead. Not very helpful. Maybe I just need to update the firmware to resolve this, but I’m not sure how to do that. It probably requires me to install NGENUITY which as I discussed, has it’s own problems.

There’s no aux cable input on the headset which could allow you to use them as old-fashioned analog headphones. Even plugging the USB cable in to your computer does not make them a wired set, it’s just for charging. That means if you lose the USB dongle for wireless connection, the headset becomes a $200 paperweight.

Conclusion

The HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless headphones have the features I was looking for, and continue to please. Ultimately I’m satisfied with my purchase, but they do leave a few things to be desired. I think they would be a great buy if the price were lower than the $200 that I paid.

Two Year Update

The headphones are still working well enough. Two problems have arisen though which bother me.

  • Two out of four of the black plastic cylinders at the point where the red metal head band attaches to the ear pieces have cracked and some plastic fallen off. The headphones are still holding together but it makes me concerned about longevity.
  • The volume wheel only works one way. You want to increase the volume? No problem! You want to decrease the volume? Nope! Only volume increases for you! To be clear, the volume goes up no matter which way you turn the wheel. This is very annoying.