The Nothing Headphones, eh? Okay, that's the last one of those I'm
about to make, but Nothing has been kind of on a tear lately making awesome,
really cool, and relatively well-priced audio products, especially with their
Nothing Headphones. However, when it comes to their A series of products,
whether that's their phones or their earbuds, sometimes the tradeoffs can be
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
budget headphone offering, the Nothing Headphones A. In front of me, I have
three of the four Nothing Headphones A colorways. We got white, black, pink,
but we don't have the yellow, which I kind of like cuz it looks like a fried
egg on your ear. We can only open one today, though, and which one's that going to be, boys? White. Well, you know
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
white ones. Okay, let's take a look.
Voilà. Okay.
I was kind of expecting these to have maybe a different color in the white
parts, but there are differences in the accents. There's like the darker gray
ones, and instead of the red accent on this ear, you get a pink accent over
here, whereas on the black ones, it is red and white. They're very very
reflective. But before we get to these, let's take a look at what else is in the
box. We have a bag. While I do
appreciate that we get a bag, you know, something to carry our headphones in
that isn't just the packaging it came in, I am a little disappointed that it's
not a full case [music] like the original Nothing Headphones.
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
3.5 mm. I don't have a lot of faith in the strain relief on these cables,
honestly. I previous Nothing products have always kind of been underwhelmed with. Though I
do like the unique, very square It's interesting cuz it's kind of like the
similar design motif to how they have the like squircle squectangle
squectangle. The round in the square shape. It's It's just It's neat. I do
really appreciate Nothing's design language. I just want
to check if the cables are color-matched.
They're all white. That's okay. There's worse things in life. Is there like a plastic peel on
this? There's like a seam. Hey, you see like very faint this faint outline that my
finger's going along? Oh, yeah. On the outside of these I could see a lot of mixed feelings about how they look. I
think they kind of lose the kind of cool
flashy complexity of the normal Nothing headphones. And I would feel like the
big plastic chunks in the middle kind of
just make these look a little a little cheap compared to like the cool designs
that show through on the actual like clear plastic areas. It also makes them
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.
Uh speaking of which, the ear cups are made of some sort of I wouldn't even go
so far as to call it like uh like faux leather cuz it doesn't even
really attempt to feel like actual leather. It's very much like a silicone
kind of It's a very interesting texture with a decent amount of cushion and a
decent amount of depth for your ears. So, these could be comfortable even
though they're not the biggest ear cups. On the bottom we have a power switch, a
status indicator, a USB-C port, and a 3.5 mm port. Something to note is that
while you can listen to audio via the USB-C, if you want to listen to the
audio via 3.5 mm, you do have to have
these on. There's no passive listening, so they will use battery if you're using
the 3.5 mm jack. That's kind of a bummer. One question that I have is if
you'll still be able to take advantage of the noise canceling and stuff while
you're listening via 3.5 mm. On the right ear cup we have our rocker that
allows you to skip tracks or fast-forward through them, and you have
your roller. We got a rocker and a roller. Do you remember that movie
RocknRolla? I don't I've never seen it, but I do remember all the ads cuz it
would come on the TV for 5 seconds and it would be RocknRolla. This is where you're going to find your volume
settings as well as pressing for play and pause. Also on the right ear cup is
a multifunction button. We're probably going to take a look at their app to
just see exactly what everything can do. On the left headphone you get nothing.
Sorry, lefties. But you can also see venting for microphones. Oh, another
secret button. You will not believe how long it took me to find this when I was
trying to pair these. That's the Bluetooth pairing button. It's really annoying to accidentally like hold a
button down and then find out that you've disconnected your headphones from whatever you're listening to. So, I
really appreciate, honestly, the whole loadout for these Nothing phones. Like,
it's such an easy headphone to control. You're not like doing a crazy bunch of
multi-presses to do things. It's pretty nice. The headband has a smooth
adjustment and has this uh kind of weird
silicone pad. It's not the nicest. Yes, Prime Minister? What's that?
The material's called liquid silicone? That's dumb as hell.
Love you. Bye. The way this mechanism adjusts, I might
worry about getting hairs caught in it or it [music] causing like kind of
pressure points for people who have maybe larger heads. I personally didn't
find too many issues with it. For the ear phones, you have swivel that can go
all the way flat for storage. And you have some kind of spring-loaded tilt
that it's really it's it's like it's weird. What I do find is that it causes
these have a bit of clamping pressure that people may not enjoy so much. I did
not find these to be particularly comfortable. I found that they got a little bit warm. When I put them on, I
can really tell they're kind of hugging my ear the whole
time. I don't really have super big ears, so usually this isn't an issue,
but your mileage may vary. They remind me so much of the AirPods Max ear cups
that I really just think that they should pull off with magnets. Oh, and look at that, there is some sort of
flashes of pink also on the inside. That's cool. And actually, with the pink
ones, you can see through to the driver
housing a little bit better. Dude, non-removable ear cups is kind of
bad. I see screws underneath the ear cups when I bend them. These really
don't feel like they come off. Shame on you, Nothing. Shame on you.
All right, it seems like these cups aren't coming off. If they do, it's it
feels destructive.
It's not a pleasurable experience. It took a lot of effort. Yeah, you just kind of got to really rip on them. But,
hey, no shame on you. In terms of other features, these come with Bluetooth 5.4.
They are IP52 water resistant and dust resistant,
which means that they can probably handle like a little bit of sweat if you're getting a little active. The
battery life that they claim is 62 to 135
hours depending on your ANC and codec usage. Oh, and that's another important
thing. This has the LDAC audio codec. So if you're
somebody who cares about having really high quality audio connection, even if
it comes at the cost of battery life, well, you got it. They do by default only use
AAC. I would have loved to see maybe
some of the Qualcomm codecs, but getting LDAC is pretty cool on a lower priced
set of cans. They also have Google fast pair for easy adding to any sort of
Android device. These charge to full in 2 hours, but if you need a quick top up,
you can plug them in for 5 minutes and you will then get 5 more hours of audio
playback, which is pretty cool. Oh, look at that. I like the text that they do to
denote the left and the right side. I think that's all there is to say about
the outsides. So the only thing there is to do is take a listen to what's inside
and that's audio, good sound hopefully. I'll let you know after this message
from our sponsor. Hey, you. Yeah, you. I like your computer case. It's looking
pretty cool. But I bet it would look a lot cooler if you had a Corsair XENEON
Edge in there. Wouldn't you love a sleek display that shows your system temps,
weather apps, or your Twitch chat? It wouldn't even be that hard to install. You could just screw it right into your
radiator mount. You could even have a picture of your cat inside of your case at all times and she's going to look up
beautiful on that 2560 by 720 60 hertz
refresh rate display. So listen up. Add another display to your setup with a
Corsair XENEON Edge at the link below. I I can report that the pairing process
was pretty smooth once I found the Bluetooth button. So let's take a listen.
Okay, first thing I noticed, ANC is quite good. I um
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
better in just a few short years even as it's climbing down to cheaper and
cheaper headphones. It's great to see. When you pair the headphones, you are also prompted to download the app, and I
think that Nothing has a great companion app. There's easy control over the noise
cancellation settings from the level of noise cancellation that you want,
adaptive mode, transparency mode, or thank you, the ability to just turn it
off. And when it's off, these honestly have pretty decent isolation. These also
have spatial audio. I don't really care for that. They have the concert mode and
cinema mode, and I don't really know what the difference is, but it's usually off. You also get access to a full
parametric equalizer. Uh you can use a
simple equalizer or use pre-made profiles, but you can go to each of these bands and adjust not just how loud
or quiet you want each of these sections of the audio spectrum to be, but you can
also adjust the Q factor, which changes how steeply the audio is curved for that
specific frequency. It's really cool, and that means that if you have any sort
of problems with these headphones, you can dial in your preference as you
please. And you can even scan a QR code or make a QR code to share your
equalization preferences to make sure that you can get a headphone that sounds
good to you or to share with your friends cuz you have so many friends when you're EQing headphones, I'm sure.
That's not fair. I have friends and I EQ headphones. You also have decent control
customization. You can put a lot of different stuff on your button,
including press and holds um and on your roller and on your paddle, though
there's a couple things that you cannot change, like the paddles don't have a
ton of customization, but that's okay. But with how much you can customize most
of the other controls and how much you can control easily on this headphone, I
don't think you're missing out on too much. You can also set up dual connection via this app so that the
headphones will specifically remember two devices that it'll more easily shift
between, so you don't have to deal with the like kind of like shaky handoff like
Bluetooth 5.4 does technically support like
multi-point connection, but it's really, really clumsy. The dual connection on
this app makes it work a lot better. But that's enough about the app. Let's give
these things a listen.
Okay, so these are kind of weird. On one
hand, they have a decent amount of bass,
but on the other hand, they kind of end up sounding like muffled. It's weird and
it kind of shows up in a lot more like acoustic or like rock stuff, whereas in
EDM, I think it sounds pretty good. I think like it's almost like hollow. Like
what they did is that they had like a lot of bass, but then they were worried about it becoming like bloated and you
losing detail in the mids, so then they like cranked down the low mids or
something. And it feels like they've almost like kind of sucked the soul out of a lot of some of the music. Outside
of that, I think that the treble reproduction is good if not a little bit peaky, but it it kind of feels like it
has enough sparkle to be like more attention-grabbing. It's more of a V-shape, but I'm just kind of
really weirded out by what they did with the bass. Could you bring it back with
the EQ? I think you could. I bet you we could. In fact, actually, I already did.
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
that's This is exactly why the EQ's awesome, because if I find that these
headphones aren't up to my preference, then I can just kind of fix that. And
what I did was improved that like weird scoop in the low mids, and things feel a
little bit more lively without feeling bloated. Though, these are still kind of a bass-heavy headphone. I'm still kind
of impressed with the ANC, honestly. Also, something to note, once you've applied the EQ to these headphones, if
you're going to be listening through USB-C or 3.5, they will hold whatever
your previous settings were when you were connected to the app, which can be
good or bad. But what does Labs have to say? Let's see if I was spot-on with
this. Okay. Interesting. Wow, the charts look really
bad. What we're looking at here is a frequency response and variation graph.
The white area is basically the preference of what most people would
think sounds good. The red is the difference in our test results across
tests and different testing apparatuses. So, you kind of have an idea of the
range of where these headphones may fall depending on your head. None of this is
guaranteed. You always have to give it a listen to tell if you really like it,
but it did I think for me this graph looks worse than it sounds. That scoop
in the mid-bass does really really harm the music out of the box, and the treble
peaks that I was talking about where I was saying there was kind of some sparkle. I didn't find it too annoying,
but you can see that there's a lot of variation across our testing, which means that like depending on your head
or even like the way it sits on your ears could mean that you could get a
very different experience, which is exactly why you can EQ in the app. But,
I think that we shouldn't really be expecting a lot of people to do that.
Nothing we should be trying to release the best headphones we can, and these
seem like a big step down from your previous headphones as well as from the even cheaper CMF headphones from the
budget nothing brand CMF. Yeah, Labs really didn't like it. Labs notes, "This
sounds bad. Just straight up bad." I don't think they sound as bad as the
graphs make them look. I'll say that much, but that's just my personal preference. I don't think it was that
awful, and the EQ I was able to put on it fixed a lot of the problems, but
that's pretty disappointing. So, let's talk about price. These come in at $200,
which is okay for the features it presents. Getting
access to multiple codex, getting Bluetooth 5.4. The battery life on these
is supposed to be killer as well as having a pretty capable ANC. They're
good on paper. It's a shame that they weren't able to really tame the audio.
And especially frustrating since they've had prior success doing this. So, I
don't really know what went wrong. But maybe if you find these on sale or you
really like the style and you like the rest of the features, you can fiddle
with the EQ to find something that will make these sound a lot better. $200 for
headphones that will block out a lot of noise in a noisy office is If you don't
care that much about sound quality, then you have a lot of other options that can
also do decent ANC, have decent features from cheap brands. Like Soundcore for
example has a lot of stuff that's competitive under the $200 price point. Maybe they can fix the sound, or maybe
you can fix the sound yourself. All I know is that we can't fix the fact that
we're at the end of the video. So, thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed
this, why don't you check out Linus's unboxing of the cheaper CMF headphones.
I don't know what he thought specifically, but from what I've read, apparently they were pretty decent.