Review: HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless

The word “impressive” is inadequate to describe my experience with HyperX's Cloud Alpha Wireless. Most wireless gaming headsets quote roughly 30 to 40 hours of battery life. For this one, HP-owned HyperX boasts 300 hours. You read that right: three hundred. I've racked my brain searching for an explanation for how these cans can last so long. I'm at a loss. After using them for more than three weeks, I can report that HyperX's claim is holding up.

Testing these headphones has been tricky. I ran into a problem I rarely have with any gadget—no matter how hard I tried, the battery just wouldn't die. For the first two weeks, I used the Cloud Alpha Wireless like I would any other headset—a few hours every day while writing or editing. I didn't even charge them when I took 'em out of the box. That's when I got curious enough to start logging my usage hours on a spreadsheet. They've yet to drop to zero percent, but we'll continue tracking battery life over the coming weeks to see if there's any trickery afoot. 

Like most gaming headsets, the Cloud Alpha Wireless uses a USB-A dongle to plug into your PC or PlayStation 4/5, and the headset communicates with it wirelessly via the 2.4-GHz frequency (up to 20 meters). Unlike some other headsets, they can't connect via Bluetooth or with a 3.5-mm headphone cord. Also unlike most headsets, they hardly ever need to be recharged.

When I realized the headset was nowhere close to dying, I started putting it through a more rigorous test. I left it playing music continuously at 50 percent volume, even when I wasn't at my desk. After nearly 24 straight hours of playback, HyperX's Ngenuity software stated that battery life dropped from 64 percent to … 59. “I'm telling you, it's running off your brainwaves,” a colleague told me. 

I'm continuing my tests, even after this review has been published. So far, I've logged more than 112 hours of continuous usage, and the Cloud Alpha Wireless has not dipped below 32 percent. This only includes hours I logged after using them for a week or two with average use—the real numbers are undeniably even higher. (Update: After recharging the headset to 100 percent and beginning the test from scratch, it has lasted a whopping 325 hours, with 7 percent remaining according to the software.)

This kind of battery life is unheard of for a wireless gaming headset. It goes beyond the kind of marginal improvements you might expect from new hardware. If Apple released a new iPhone that lasted three days on a single charge, that'd be an impressive engineering feat. If it released a phone that could last a month, we'd have serious questions about how it violated the laws of physics. That's the position HyperX has put us in.

Naturally, I asked HyperX if it could explain the cosmic wormhole it's stealing battery life from. This is the statement the company sent via email: “While HyperX is unable to share full details [of] the design, the Alpha Wireless features the latest [integrated circuit] chip technology, a lithium-polymer 1,500-mAh battery, and updated dual-chamber technology to make room for the battery.”

The 1,500-mAh battery cell is the only tangible clue here, but even that's not very helpful. The HyperX Cloud Flight, the predecessor and a now thoroughly unseated pick in our Best Wireless Gaming Headsets guide, also has a 1,500-mAh battery. Yet that headset only lasts around 30 hours.

After speaking to Arthur Shi, a battery expert at iFixit, our best possible guess is that HyperX found a way to either dramatically cut down on the power required for signal processing and wireless communication, or to offload some processing to the device it's plugged into. Whatever the answer, the company isn't sharing.

To a certain extent, the answer doesn't matter. As much as an unexplained 10X increase in battery performance raises eyebrows, the results are plain to see. It's been more than three weeks. I still haven't plugged a charger into this headset. This is the kind of upgrade that's so massive it baffled the entire WIRED Gear team. Quite simply, we've never seen anything like this kind of battery life from a wireless gaming headset.

Battery life is just one criterion—obviously sound quality is just as important. Well, they sound incredible, especially considering the $200 asking price. When one spec on a product is so far above the competition, the first thing I look for is where the company cut corners. To my surprise, audio quality isn't one of them. Even at 50 percent volume, music booms out with deep bass and crisp vocals.

I compared them to a set of studio headphones and found shockingly little difference. I could detect the faintest bit of postprocessing that muddied some of the higher frequencies, but that's fairly typical for gaming headsets. These are usually designed to accentuate the kind of sounds you'd hear in a video game, like explosions or gunfire, and they do that job really well.

A part of what makes this impressive is that the Cloud Alpha Wireless uses 50-mm drivers to produce the sound. This is the norm for many gaming headsets, but using smaller, weaker drivers would've been one way to reduce power consumption and increase battery life. Given the absurd battery gains in this headset, this was my first suspicion, yet the opposite is true. This headset has some of the best audio of any wireless headset I've tested.

The Cloud Alpha Wireless also have the benefit of feeling lighter than nearly every other headset I've tried. (Another surprise as I initially assumed HyperX was using bigger, heavier batteries.)  It makes them much easier to wear for long periods of time. They're comfy too. The memory foam along the ear cups and headband is squishy yet retains its shape, and the faux leather is supple without feeling sticky or trapping too much heat.

The red metal core of the headband might look dated—I'd have loved another color palette besides the overused red-on-black—but it bends with the perfect amount of resistance. It takes no effort to stretch it, and it doesn't feel like it's pressing too hard against the sides of my head. When I take the headset off, the headband is still tense enough to pull the ear cups together.

The on-ear controls are thoughtfully designed, with each button and dial having a specific feel. The power button is concave, the mic mute button is convex, and the volume dial on the right ear cup has a ridged feel, almost like a gear with soft teeth. There's a subtle click for each step of the volume knob, making fine adjustments easy, and it still spins freely enough to quickly turn it all the way down when audio suddenly starts blasting.

I've yet to use the USB-C charging port, but that's what you'll inevitably use to recharge these cans when (if?) they die. Then there's the detachable microphone. Like many gaming headsets, it's a very get-the-job-done kind of mic. If you wanted to record audio for streaming or a podcast, you'd probably want to invest in a USB mic, but no one I talked to with it had any problems hearing or understanding me. 

I tried as hard as I could to figure out how in the world HyperX managed to squeeze so much extra juice out of a device category that hasn't seen much improvement in battery life. I failed.

This is, simply put, a fantastic-sounding, comfortable pair of headphones for your PC or PlayStation with a solid microphone and intuitive physical controls. They somehow do all of this with a battery you only need to charge once, maybe twice a month. For $200. It's hard to recommend anything else for most people.