Razer Kaira and Kaira Pro
A Turtle Beach alternative with RGB lighting and a great microphone.
The Razer Kaira is pretty sleek… for a gaming headset. With a black and green color scheme and RGB lighting on the sides of the earcups, it’s definitely got that gamer aesthetic – so much so that you wouldn’t want to wear it anywhere else outside of your house – but it’s not an awful look by any stretch of the imagination.
In terms of construction, the Razer Kaira is mostly plastic with the exception of a thin metal band that runs through the bridge of the headset. What that means is that the bridge is fairly sturdy, but the joints themselves are plastic and are more likely to be prone to snapping. That’s not exactly what you want to hear when you’re buying a $149 headset, but that’s what Razer went with here.
The good news is that, because it’s mostly plastic, it’s a fairly light headset at only 293g for the regular Kaira and 330g for the Razer Kaira Pro. That lightweight design, alongside the memory foam padding and cloth earpad coverings, really makes the headsets soft and comfortable to wear for an extended period of time.
In terms of tonal balance and overall audio quality, the Razer Kaira and Kaira Pro lie somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. To wit, the headset doesn’t focus much on treble or bass and instead homes in on the mids to make dialogue come through crystal clear. The result is a headset that sounds fine, but not dynamic, spacious or full of detail.
We played a few different games with the Kaira Pro including Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order from Xbox Game Pass and competitive shooter staple, Overwatch. In both cases we were able to hear some nice details in the ambient sounds and a few positional audio cues, but everything lacked a level of precision we’ve heard on other headsets.
For music and movies, the Kaira and Kaira Pro are good but not great. You’ll notice that focus on the midrange that you’ll hear when paired with consoles and even a little bit of bass response, but it’s lacking details you’d hear with a pair of proper over-ear headphones.
The good news is that, while their audio reproduction skills aren’t great, they do make you sound great to others thanks to Razer’s HyperClear Cardioid microphone. The mic does an exceptional job picking up your voice and radically reduces the amount of ambient noise that comes through on the other end. To put it to the test we called someone with music playing in the background. The person on the other end, surprisingly said they couldn’t hear anything besides our voice coming through the mic.
The Razer Kaira and Kaira Pro are solid, mid-range headsets custom-built for the Xbox Series X and Xbox One. They offer a powerful (and detachable) noise-cancelling microphone and colorful RGB lighting, but their plastic construction and so-so audio performance prevent them from overtaking the new Xbox Wireless Headset as our favorite Xbox Series X headset.
Nick Pino