If you’re looking for gaming audio to be pumped directly to your ears, you’ve got two options. You can go all-in and splash the cash on a set of cracking cans (and if that’s the case, let us point you to the stunning Audeze Maxwell Ultraviolet). Or you can scour the earbuds market for some bargains. If you’re looking to do the latter, you’d do well to consider the Final VR2000 for gaming Hi-Fi Earphones.
A simple plug and play option, there’s nothing fancy about that put together by Final for their VR2000 gaming earbuds. At least that’s the case if you’re looking from the outside. It’s here where these are about as simple as you can get. But sometimes simple is all you are looking for in life, yes?
A set of wired earbuds, the Final VR2000 buds are suitable for anything that comes with a 3.5mm audio jack as standard. That means over the course of our review process, we’ve been using these in a number of ways. They’ve been connected up to our Xbox controller for standard gaming sessions and they’ve been plugged into our laptop for some PC and Game Pass Cloud play. And it’s safe to say that the Final VR2000 buds have worked absolutely fine across those formats and platforms.
Have they wowed us in that time? Well, yes and no. See, as an olive green set of wired buds that come with just an in-line volume control and mic-mute as standard, there’s little here to go mad about. But what they do is allow for the most simple of play times, sticking that cable into a device of your choice and being immediately hit with audio.
That audio is more than decent too. Set up by Final to ‘extract every detail from your digital surroundings‘ (them’s their words, not ours) and powered by 6mm ‘fCore DU’ drivers, it’s all crisp and clear, gets rather loud and ensures that the detail you are looking for from your gaming audio is on point. We’ve been able to take in some great moments using the VR2000’s for gaming, happy with their performance, most particularly in The Crew Motorfest, listening in on the tunes and engine roars with glee. Once in place, the buds are capable of providing some high levels of bass too. For us, we’ve possibly wanted a tad more boom, but there’s no denying that Final have been able to tune these up really well for gaming purposes.
They’ve got the fitment nailed down too. An extremely personal thing, we’ve found the Final VR2000 earbuds to be massively comfortable to chuck into our lugholes, happily leaving them in place for minutes and hours at a time. In fact, slot them in place, give a little twist and, aside from having that audio piled towards your drums, you’d forget they are in place. Much of that is thanks to a sleek, extremely lightweight ABS plastic design that fits neatly into your ears. Once in place, they do look the part.
Taking a gander at the visual cues of the Final VR2000 and these are about as plain as you can get. Pretty angular in design and complete with a dark olive green finish (if we weren’t told these were olive green, we’d have run with ‘matt-black’), aside from a tiny piece of Final VR2000 wording on the inner side of the buds (and frankly, it’s so small we had to shine a torch on it to read it!), there’s not a single bit of branding or any fancy show in place here. Whilst it allows the buds to sit in your ears in a rather understated way, it does feel a strange call to us. If we were behind the marketing strategy of Final, we’d be looking to slap our logo on the externals of the buds in one way or another. These though, plain; nothing more, nothing less. Would the Final logo look out of place? We don’t think so. In fact, it would give them a little more character.
A single wire comes out of each of the buds, merging just after the in-line controls that are in place. Again, simplicity is key – you’ve got a volume up button, a volume down button and a mic mute. All are easy to find in the heat of the action, with a hold of the mute button cutting all of your comms. Allow voice to be penetrated through the in-built Final VR2000 mics into the virtual world, and your companions and team mates should be fine too. We’ve had no complaints in that respect.
However, the volume controls are more hit and miss. Playing on laptop, they work absolutely fine. Hook the Final VR2000’s up to your Xbox controller though and you’ll be left to worm your way into the console settings if you are looking to shift up, or down, the sound levels. Annoying? Yes, but then, for the most part, once a level is found, we tend to stick with it.
And really, there’s not much more that can be said for the Final VR2000. These are very much the definition of plug-and-play, with little in terms of visual bells, whistles or anything else for that matter. However, where they excel is in the sound – if you want some decent gaming sound that will see you fully immersed, crack on. You’ll be more than happy with what is offered.
Helping complement – and included in the box – are a whole range of different bud tips, something which may be crucial to some. Personally, we’ve found the default, out-of-the-box tips to be absolutely fine, but we’ve passed these to others and they’ve looked for a different sizing. There are also a couple of very flexible ear hooks should they be of need (we’ve not needed them), with a rather lovely little carry pouch also included. In fact, this is about the only thing that has any form of Final logo’ing on it, and even then, it’s extremely subtle.
So, the Final VR2000 for Gaming earbuds – worth a shot? Well, if you want a capable pair of buds that you can plug in and get on with all things gaming, they do the job. For us, we want a teeny bit more bass to our audio joys, but aside from that the soundscape is right on it; there’s probably more than enough here to provide the joys required of the vast majority of gamers. Consider they only cost £59.99 and these should well be on your list.Â
Huge thanks go out to Final for providing us with their Final VR2000 buds for review. You can grab a pair of Final VR2000 buds for yourself from the likes of Amazon.Â
