Razer HP-1 Gaming Headphones

These headphones end in a DVI port instead of a headphone jack. How can this be..?

Surround headphones have fair bit of a wow factor to them. Especially these, a pair of Razer HP-1s, which are rigid, light and have sections backlit with blue LEDs. But your gear is almost expected to be a matching Razer soundcard, which ditch 3.5mm jacks in favour of a DVI port, and is pimped extensively throughout the course of the headphones’ manual.

Once you start using the headphones, you’ll smell the gimmickry. There is a detachable microphone on the bottom of the left driver and blue LEDs in the sides of the headphones, which can be turned off. The 3.5mm leads that plug into the analogue surround and microphone ports on your “conventional soundcard” (reading from the manual here, folks) have been replaced with a moulded DVI socket.

Why use a DVI connector? Because they have enough pins in them to connect the microphone and the 8 drivers in the headphones to the matching Razer soundcard in one hit. This physical, not electrical, DVI port will give some people the bright idea to try and plug these headphones into their video card, so there’s a tag around the cable to warn you not to.

Before you hear any sound through the headphones, through your conventional soundcard, you’ll have to deal with the DVI to 3.5mm breakout adapter. In addition to the multiple 3.5mm plugs, it includes a USB connector to provide power to the next hurdle, the control and amplifier box.

For no obvious reason, the drivers are powered by miniature amplifiers which need the five volts that is piped through the USB connection to work. This means you won’t be able to use the headphones away from a PC unless you do some kind of battery hack. This limits their use to PCs only, but they are called gaming headphones, so you can’t say you weren’t warned.

There are four potentiometers on the two sides of the box that control the front, rear and centre volume, as well as one for bass. Finally there’s a master volume control that you use once you’ve set up the sound the way you like it. The problem with this system is that at low levels the volume on the left speaker becomes softer than the right.

There’s a miniature subwoofer and three angled drivers in each earphone, the largest and clearest of which are the front left and right drivers. The rear and centre drivers are much smaller and are mounted above the main driver, and sound a little tinny, but they are only really used for speech and effects, so fidelity isn’t a big issue.

Surprisingly, for such large closed back headphones, the ends of your ears rub against the fabric covering the drivers. Apart from that they’re very comfortable for short bursts, because they heat up your ears too quickly during long listening sessions. Even though they’re clean and crisp (especially with heavy and electronic music) they seem a little flat with surround sources.

Although you can hear the surround effect, it’s not as pronounced as it should be. After a few blasts through Call of Duty and Far Cry we felt that although the sound did wrap around us, it was only being pushed slightly in front of us. Sounds from behind us felt like they were coming from the main speakers, but only a little louder, implying the rear channels weren’t providing as much separation as they should have.

The unique features (seriously, they end in a DVI plug, anyone who hasn’t seen them before will do a double take) that give it the wow factor are supposed to be selling points, but they feel more like design problems. It’s a shame too, because the headphones are solidly made, lightweight and sound rich and spacious, towards the centre anyway. But they’re still cumbersome and simply don’t feel as though they’re worth the money.