Setup, Design & Observations
This design is tried and tested, the aluminium frame keeps things light and strong, while the rubberised plastic creates a high quality feel. All the cables are braided and the HyperX logo anodized on the earcups looks very impressive. The leather headband and padding is very soft, helping to keep things comfortable. The clamp strength is perfect, and is one of the few headsets that is genuinely easy to forget you are wearing it. There is a little warmth buildup but both earpad types are fairly breathable, though the leather, may have a sweaty build up, while the velour will be slightly absorbent. The removable earpads are large, easily accommodating all but the hugest of ears, and due to the memory foam padding, they both remain comfortable even when wearing glasses. Giving the user a choice between earpad material is great, the leather earpads are soft to the touch, while the velour is soft and plush without causing irritation. The QH-90 was already a very comfortable headset, by giving the option of leather or velour with the Cloud, as if by magic, the HyperX team have taken that one step further.
Looking at other aspects of the product, the control box is similar quality to the QPad variant which is fairly good, but should it fail, what does it matter? That is the beauty of modular cables. The splitter cable included allows for compatibility with the PS4, some may enjoy that aspect of this product too.
Multimedia
Listening through a various tracks and a standard playlist, it would seem that the audio properties are a little more balanced when compared to the QH-90, which had a slight overpowering high compared to mids; it also seemed like there was a wider soundstage too. The bass was incredibly deep and smooth, perfectly sitting somewhere between the bass performance of the Bitfenix FLO and the Corsair Vengeance 2100. Playing through a frequency sweep between 10-200Hz revealed impressive low end performance, the 20Hz-10,000KHz sweep also proved fairly balanced though there was a small drop between 6-8000KHz but nothing dramatic, while the high end proved to be crystal. The music listening experience was very pleasurable and the accuracy was surprisingly good.
The audio performance of the HyperX cloud reflected well in movies, giving a very enjoyable experience while not losing any background details amongst powerful foreground noises. Man of Steel certainly sounded as destructive as it looked. In games, there seemed to be a slight trade off, while the bass is creamy rich and has enough punch to satisfy my own preference, there was a lack of 'rumble', or impact compared to other closed back gaming headsets, some may prefer this head shaking experience from their games, though generally the Cloud was a fantastic gamer.
Microphone
The removable microphone performed great in game/ Teamspeak and on Skype. Voice was reported as being clear though a little deeper than natural. It also tended to pick up a little background noise though this can be curbed by reducing sensitivity or by using any noise cancelling features you may have on your sound card. It is worth noting that (as obvious at it may seem), like playback, the recording performance of your microphone is also affected by your audio processor, so if you have regular complaints about your microphone even after changing your headset... then maybe you need to upgrade your sound card.
