Corsair Void Stereo
Budget audio but not without sin.
At this price, the Void Stereo is bound to come with some caveats, although we didn’t expect quite the degree of plastic and soft fabric that besieged us. However, if it weren’t for Kingston offering up the HyperX Cloud IIs, featuring an aluminium and leather design for $10 more, we wouldn’t even question it.
The drivers do sound quite flat, unfortunately, and a general muddiness shone through under heavy bass, while the treble and high mids suffered from a lack of depth. They were average at best. Instrumental music suffered the most, feeling deflated, with less bite, and empty, as though each song had been recorded while the microphone was muffled by a pillow. There just wasn’t enough in the mids. The bass was certainly prominent, but it couldn’t make up for the lack of overall soundscape.
For synthetic dubstep and heavier genres that don’t rely on the rising clash of string instruments and treble-based percussion, the Voids sounded good. Gaming was enjoyable, too — in fact, the Voids excelled in this area. But here inherently lies the problem. You have to want these just for gaming and nothing else. For accurate, deep, acoustical representation, they just fall flat on their face, and that saddens us greatly. After all, none of us really game 100% of the time.
Overall, they’re still fairly comfortable, and provide a pretty average soundscape.
For the price, we would have liked to have seen a better frequency response (maybe to catch some of that missing treble), and use of more premium build materials.