Audio Performance

I'll split the audio performance analysis into two parts—gaming and music. Even though the headset produces the same sound regardless of what it's being used for, you won't necessarily look for the same things while annihilating your virtual opponents as you will when listening to your favorite tunes.

Gaming

Going into this review, my expectations in terms of the Onikuma K5's sound quality were about as low as they can be because of its $25 price tag. You can imagine my surprise after I found out that it's actually quite decent! It's not the most detailed or natural-sounding headset in the world, but also manages to avoid all of the usual pitfalls—the bass isn't extremely bloated and messy, and the mids and highs don't sound hollow and distant.

The bass is definitely boosted to an extent, which adds a certain amount of artificial punchiness to the sound. Truth be told, that's something many users will actually like—thick, slammy bass can bring a lot of excitement and fun into the games you're playing, especially if they're filled with action. The mid-range contains just enough information to give you a good general idea of where enemy footsteps are coming from or where you're being shot from. All of that happens even though the Onikuma K5 is not very open in the higher part of the frequency spectrum, which also explains why it never sounds exceptionally detailed. I didn't expect to be writing this about a $25 gaming headset, but the Onikuma K5 served me quite well on the ruthless battlefields of PUBG, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Blackout, and Battlefield V.

I could analyze the finer points of its sound performance in games for a few more paragraphs, but this is the gist of it: you get a lot more sound than what you're paying for. As far as overall sound quality goes, the Onikuma K5 stands shoulder to shoulder with gaming headsets two or three times its price. When spending $25 on a gaming headset, you wouldn't dare think you could get this kind of performance from it.

The passive noise isolation is quite good because of the closed-back nature of the ear cups. Meaning, the people in your vicinity won't hear what's playing through your headphones, nor will you be able to hear them.

Music

Everything that it does right when gaming, the Onikuma K5 successfully translates to music as well. Your favorite songs won't sound very airy or detailed due to the fairly recessed high-range. They will, however, sound bassy, punchy, and fun. One of the major drawbacks of boosting the bass is that it ends up sounding completely separated from the mid-range. The Onikuma K5 manages to avoid this by not going overboard with the bass boost. Even though some excessive rumble can be heard and the transition from bass to mid-range is by no means seamless, a certain level of smoothness is still successfully preserved. In other words, while the bass can definitely spill into the mid-range and dampen the vocals in certain types of music, it doesn't get in the way all the time or so much that your ears would get fatigued. If you're primarily into electronic music and hip-hop, this won't bother you much—you'll get your dose of excitement from that boosted bass with enough cohesiveness in the rest of the frequency spectrum to not care about a lack of naturality and sparkle.

Perhaps more importantly, and I can't stress this enough, is that the Onikuma K5 doesn't sound like a $25 gaming headset. I've tested many headsets with price tags much closer to $100 that didn't sound any better than the K5. I keep repeating this because it is its strongest selling point—well, that and its microphone, which we'll get to in a moment.

Combining the Onikuma K5 with an external sound card or a DAC/headphone amp combo makes little sense as you definitely wouldn't be looking at a headset of this price if you had any intention of plugging it into anything other than your integrated sound card or a gaming console.