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The Nothing Headphones, eh? Okay, that's the last one of those I'm

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about to make, but Nothing has been kind of on a tear lately making awesome,

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really cool, and relatively well-priced audio products, especially with their

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Nothing Headphones. However, when it comes to their A series of products,

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whether that's their phones or their earbuds, sometimes the tradeoffs can be

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a little bit hit or miss, but we're hoping that all of the tradeoffs are going to be the right ones for their new

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budget headphone offering, the Nothing Headphones A. In front of me, I have

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three of the four Nothing Headphones A colorways. We got white, black, pink,

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but we don't have the yellow, which I kind of like cuz it looks like a fried

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egg on your ear. We can only open one today, though, and which one's that going to be, boys? White. Well, you know

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what? Cuz you caught me in such a good mood, we're going to unbox all of them, but we're going to listen to just the

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white ones. Okay, let's take a look.

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Voilà. Okay.

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I was kind of expecting these to have maybe a different color in the white

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parts, but there are differences in the accents. There's like the darker gray

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ones, and instead of the red accent on this ear, you get a pink accent over

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here, whereas on the black ones, it is red and white. They're very very

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reflective. But before we get to these, let's take a look at what else is in the

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box. We have a bag. While I do

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appreciate that we get a bag, you know, something to carry our headphones in

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that isn't just the packaging it came in, I am a little disappointed that it's

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not a full case [music] like the original Nothing Headphones.

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Not that it was like the best case ever, but it was a nice value add. In the box, we have two cables, one C to C and one

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3.5 mm. I don't have a lot of faith in the strain relief on these cables,

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honestly. I previous Nothing products have always kind of been underwhelmed with. Though I

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do like the unique, very square It's interesting cuz it's kind of like the

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similar design motif to how they have the like squircle squectangle

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squectangle. The round in the square shape. It's It's just It's neat. I do

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really appreciate Nothing's design language. I just want

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to check if the cables are color-matched.

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They're all white. That's okay. There's worse things in life. Is there like a plastic peel on

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this? There's like a seam. Hey, you see like very faint this faint outline that my

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finger's going along? Oh, yeah. On the outside of these I could see a lot of mixed feelings about how they look. I

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think they kind of lose the kind of cool

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flashy complexity of the normal Nothing headphones. And I would feel like the

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big plastic chunks in the middle kind of

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just make these look a little a little cheap compared to like the cool designs

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that show through on the actual like clear plastic areas. It also makes them

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a lot bigger than they need to be. Like look at how much bigger they are than their ear cups just cuz they're square.

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Uh speaking of which, the ear cups are made of some sort of I wouldn't even go

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so far as to call it like uh like faux leather cuz it doesn't even

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really attempt to feel like actual leather. It's very much like a silicone

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kind of It's a very interesting texture with a decent amount of cushion and a

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decent amount of depth for your ears. So, these could be comfortable even

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though they're not the biggest ear cups. On the bottom we have a power switch, a

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status indicator, a USB-C port, and a 3.5 mm port. Something to note is that

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while you can listen to audio via the USB-C, if you want to listen to the

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audio via 3.5 mm, you do have to have

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these on. There's no passive listening, so they will use battery if you're using

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the 3.5 mm jack. That's kind of a bummer. One question that I have is if

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you'll still be able to take advantage of the noise canceling and stuff while

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you're listening via 3.5 mm. On the right ear cup we have our rocker that

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allows you to skip tracks or fast-forward through them, and you have

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your roller. We got a rocker and a roller. Do you remember that movie

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RocknRolla? I don't I've never seen it, but I do remember all the ads cuz it

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would come on the TV for 5 seconds and it would be RocknRolla. This is where you're going to find your volume

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settings as well as pressing for play and pause. Also on the right ear cup is

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a multifunction button. We're probably going to take a look at their app to

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just see exactly what everything can do. On the left headphone you get nothing.

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Sorry, lefties. But you can also see venting for microphones. Oh, another

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secret button. You will not believe how long it took me to find this when I was

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trying to pair these. That's the Bluetooth pairing button. It's really annoying to accidentally like hold a

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button down and then find out that you've disconnected your headphones from whatever you're listening to. So, I

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really appreciate, honestly, the whole loadout for these Nothing phones. Like,

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it's such an easy headphone to control. You're not like doing a crazy bunch of

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multi-presses to do things. It's pretty nice. The headband has a smooth

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adjustment and has this uh kind of weird

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silicone pad. It's not the nicest. Yes, Prime Minister? What's that?

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The material's called liquid silicone? That's dumb as hell.

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Love you. Bye. The way this mechanism adjusts, I might

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worry about getting hairs caught in it or it [music] causing like kind of

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pressure points for people who have maybe larger heads. I personally didn't

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find too many issues with it. For the ear phones, you have swivel that can go

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all the way flat for storage. And you have some kind of spring-loaded tilt

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that it's really it's it's like it's weird. What I do find is that it causes

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these have a bit of clamping pressure that people may not enjoy so much. I did

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not find these to be particularly comfortable. I found that they got a little bit warm. When I put them on, I

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can really tell they're kind of hugging my ear the whole

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time. I don't really have super big ears, so usually this isn't an issue,

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but your mileage may vary. They remind me so much of the AirPods Max ear cups

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that I really just think that they should pull off with magnets. Oh, and look at that, there is some sort of

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flashes of pink also on the inside. That's cool. And actually, with the pink

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ones, you can see through to the driver

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housing a little bit better. Dude, non-removable ear cups is kind of

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bad. I see screws underneath the ear cups when I bend them. These really

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don't feel like they come off. Shame on you, Nothing. Shame on you.

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All right, it seems like these cups aren't coming off. If they do, it's it

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feels destructive.

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It's not a pleasurable experience. It took a lot of effort. Yeah, you just kind of got to really rip on them. But,

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hey, no shame on you. In terms of other features, these come with Bluetooth 5.4.

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They are IP52 water resistant and dust resistant,

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which means that they can probably handle like a little bit of sweat if you're getting a little active. The

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battery life that they claim is 62 to 135

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hours depending on your ANC and codec usage. Oh, and that's another important

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thing. This has the LDAC audio codec. So if you're

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somebody who cares about having really high quality audio connection, even if

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it comes at the cost of battery life, well, you got it. They do by default only use

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AAC. I would have loved to see maybe

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some of the Qualcomm codecs, but getting LDAC is pretty cool on a lower priced

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set of cans. They also have Google fast pair for easy adding to any sort of

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Android device. These charge to full in 2 hours, but if you need a quick top up,

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you can plug them in for 5 minutes and you will then get 5 more hours of audio

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playback, which is pretty cool. Oh, look at that. I like the text that they do to

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denote the left and the right side. I think that's all there is to say about

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the outsides. So the only thing there is to do is take a listen to what's inside

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and that's audio, good sound hopefully. I'll let you know after this message

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was pretty smooth once I found the Bluetooth button. So let's take a listen.

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Okay, first thing I noticed, ANC is quite good. I um

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don't find that it's causing any sort of like pressure sensation or anything like that. ANC on the whole has gotten a lot

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better in just a few short years even as it's climbing down to cheaper and

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cheaper headphones. It's great to see. When you pair the headphones, you are also prompted to download the app, and I

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think that Nothing has a great companion app. There's easy control over the noise

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cancellation settings from the level of noise cancellation that you want,

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adaptive mode, transparency mode, or thank you, the ability to just turn it

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off. And when it's off, these honestly have pretty decent isolation. These also

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have spatial audio. I don't really care for that. They have the concert mode and

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cinema mode, and I don't really know what the difference is, but it's usually off. You also get access to a full

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parametric equalizer. Uh you can use a

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simple equalizer or use pre-made profiles, but you can go to each of these bands and adjust not just how loud

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or quiet you want each of these sections of the audio spectrum to be, but you can

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also adjust the Q factor, which changes how steeply the audio is curved for that

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specific frequency. It's really cool, and that means that if you have any sort

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of problems with these headphones, you can dial in your preference as you

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please. And you can even scan a QR code or make a QR code to share your

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equalization preferences to make sure that you can get a headphone that sounds

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good to you or to share with your friends cuz you have so many friends when you're EQing headphones, I'm sure.

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That's not fair. I have friends and I EQ headphones. You also have decent control

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customization. You can put a lot of different stuff on your button,

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including press and holds um and on your roller and on your paddle, though

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there's a couple things that you cannot change, like the paddles don't have a

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ton of customization, but that's okay. But with how much you can customize most

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of the other controls and how much you can control easily on this headphone, I

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don't think you're missing out on too much. You can also set up dual connection via this app so that the

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headphones will specifically remember two devices that it'll more easily shift

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between, so you don't have to deal with the like kind of like shaky handoff like

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Bluetooth 5.4 does technically support like

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multi-point connection, but it's really, really clumsy. The dual connection on

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this app makes it work a lot better. But that's enough about the app. Let's give

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these things a listen.

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Okay, so these are kind of weird. On one

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hand, they have a decent amount of bass,

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but on the other hand, they kind of end up sounding like muffled. It's weird and

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it kind of shows up in a lot more like acoustic or like rock stuff, whereas in

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EDM, I think it sounds pretty good. I think like it's almost like hollow. Like

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what they did is that they had like a lot of bass, but then they were worried about it becoming like bloated and you

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losing detail in the mids, so then they like cranked down the low mids or

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something. And it feels like they've almost like kind of sucked the soul out of a lot of some of the music. Outside

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of that, I think that the treble reproduction is good if not a little bit peaky, but it it kind of feels like it

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has enough sparkle to be like more attention-grabbing. It's more of a V-shape, but I'm just kind of

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really weirded out by what they did with the bass. Could you bring it back with

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the EQ? I think you could. I bet you we could. In fact, actually, I already did.

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I took a little bit of time, spent some time with the EQ to bring it back, and I think that these sound a lot better. And

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that's This is exactly why the EQ's awesome, because if I find that these

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headphones aren't up to my preference, then I can just kind of fix that. And

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what I did was improved that like weird scoop in the low mids, and things feel a

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little bit more lively without feeling bloated. Though, these are still kind of a bass-heavy headphone. I'm still kind

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of impressed with the ANC, honestly. Also, something to note, once you've applied the EQ to these headphones, if

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you're going to be listening through USB-C or 3.5, they will hold whatever

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your previous settings were when you were connected to the app, which can be

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good or bad. But what does Labs have to say? Let's see if I was spot-on with

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this. Okay. Interesting. Wow, the charts look really

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bad. What we're looking at here is a frequency response and variation graph.

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The white area is basically the preference of what most people would

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think sounds good. The red is the difference in our test results across

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tests and different testing apparatuses. So, you kind of have an idea of the

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range of where these headphones may fall depending on your head. None of this is

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guaranteed. You always have to give it a listen to tell if you really like it,

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but it did I think for me this graph looks worse than it sounds. That scoop

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in the mid-bass does really really harm the music out of the box, and the treble

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peaks that I was talking about where I was saying there was kind of some sparkle. I didn't find it too annoying,

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but you can see that there's a lot of variation across our testing, which means that like depending on your head

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or even like the way it sits on your ears could mean that you could get a

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very different experience, which is exactly why you can EQ in the app. But,

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I think that we shouldn't really be expecting a lot of people to do that.

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Nothing we should be trying to release the best headphones we can, and these

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seem like a big step down from your previous headphones as well as from the even cheaper CMF headphones from the

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budget nothing brand CMF. Yeah, Labs really didn't like it. Labs notes, "This

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sounds bad. Just straight up bad." I don't think they sound as bad as the

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graphs make them look. I'll say that much, but that's just my personal preference. I don't think it was that

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awful, and the EQ I was able to put on it fixed a lot of the problems, but

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that's pretty disappointing. So, let's talk about price. These come in at $200,

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which is okay for the features it presents. Getting

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access to multiple codex, getting Bluetooth 5.4. The battery life on these

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is supposed to be killer as well as having a pretty capable ANC. They're

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good on paper. It's a shame that they weren't able to really tame the audio.

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And especially frustrating since they've had prior success doing this. So, I

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don't really know what went wrong. But maybe if you find these on sale or you

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really like the style and you like the rest of the features, you can fiddle

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with the EQ to find something that will make these sound a lot better. $200 for

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headphones that will block out a lot of noise in a noisy office is If you don't

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care that much about sound quality, then you have a lot of other options that can

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also do decent ANC, have decent features from cheap brands. Like Soundcore for

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example has a lot of stuff that's competitive under the $200 price point. Maybe they can fix the sound, or maybe

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you can fix the sound yourself. All I know is that we can't fix the fact that

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we're at the end of the video. So, thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed

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this, why don't you check out Linus's unboxing of the cheaper CMF headphones.

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I don't know what he thought specifically, but from what I've read, apparently they were pretty decent.