Roccat Kulo Virtual Surround Gaming Headset Review

A Closer Look

The hard-wired headset comes with dual 3.5mm jacks, which are colour coded as microphone and headphone connectors for an easy setup process.

There’s a slim in-line controller, it’s pretty basic, only offering a volume slider, but it’s still a nice bonus to have.

There’s some subtle Roccat branding on the reverse side of the controller.

The headset looks rather cool, and while it does feature a lot of plastic, they’re very nicely finished and feel quite durable. There’s a hard-wired microphone boom on the left ear cup, which can be folded up and out of the way when not in use, and when you do so, the microphone will automatically mute its self. The mid-section of the microphone boom is flexible too, which not offering a lot of adjustment here, it does help prevent the mic from snapping should you catch it on your clothes/desk/etc.

The driver housing is nice and slim, meaning they won’t stick out from the side of your head too much and since this is an on-the-ear design, you wouldn’t want them to be too big anyway.

There’s some branding on each of the ear cups, but it’s nicely done and not too over the top like so many other gaming headsets; you could easily wear this in an office without looking silly.

The headband is pretty durable too, with a metal strip running through it for added stability on the side, and a very good range of adjustment to help ensure a comfortable fit.

There’s some memory foam padding on the interior of the headband, which is quite hard, but given the lightweight design of the headset, it still feels comfortable to wear and the foam will wear in nicely after a few uses, so don’t worry if it doesn’t feel quite right at first.

The drivers come with the soft fabric covers pre-installed, which have a nice feel to them that should be good for long gaming sessions.

Simply twist them to detach the covers and you can easily clean them or swap them out for the leather ones.

I’m not sure I like the aesthetics of these leather ones, but when they’re on your ears you can’t see this part anyway and they’re honestly a lot more comfortable than they look. Which one you prefer is subjective and it’s well worth spending a few hours with each installed to see which feels/sounds the best for you.

The microphone is nothing amazing, but it does deliver nice clear audio and a good level of sensitivity for team chat and Skype calls, which is about the same as any other headset in this price range. I do like that you can mute it by folding it up out of the way, though, that’s a nice feature and I wish more headsets offered the same function.

I’ll be honest, a cheaper on-ear headset, I wasn’t expecting much in terms of acoustic performance, so I was caught off guard when I fired up the headset and heard just how powerful the drivers are. They lack some of the finer detail of its bigger and more expensive brothers, but there is a punchy lower end, warm mids and clear highs that give some liveliness to movies, music and especially so for games. The software is a little clunky and old school, but even with that in mind I was surprised at how well the virtual 7.1 worked.

You can switch between stereo and surround easily enough, and you can move the virtual speakers around to calibrate the effect to suit your taste. I tried it out with Interstellar and the audio was fantastic on surround, giving a good definition of the vocal track, backing music and sound effects. The same can be said for gaming, with really nice fidelity of the scene and still giving enough range for voice chat audio to cut through the mix.

There’s a versatile EQ, which is always nice but the preset profiles have mixed results, often muddying the sound or leading to distortion. Of course, it all depends on your source material, so I’m not going to complain about having more options.