Razer Piranha Gaming Headset

Performance:

For testing we had connected the Razer Piranha to a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook. This system was running Ubuntu 8.04 Beta with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel and ALSA 1.0.15. We had tested these headphones when playing Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, listening to music in Rhythmbox, and watching a movie within mplayer.

Overall, we were pleased with the Razer Piranha, but they weren't the best headphones we have experienced. The headphones had worked the best while gaming with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, but the sound wasn't as rich as we would like when listening to music or watching a movie. However, the Piranha is certainly better then the speakers integrated into the ThinkPad T61. What had also surprised us was the quality of the microphone. We had recorded some audio samples with the microphone and were very pleased with the crisp recordings. The microphone was one of the best we've experienced on gaming headsets.

Conclusion:

While the Razer Piranha Gaming Communicator isn't the best headset we've ever used, it's quality is certainly in the upper-end compared to other gaming headsets and it's priced at only $80 USD so Goldmund quality isn't to be expected. The microphone on this headset, however, is superb. The build quality on the Piranha is also very nice, but we'd personally prefer the larger-sized Barracuda HP-1 headset for its build quality and the eight individual speaker drivers. At the end of the day though, this is a fine headset whether you're a casual or professional gamer.