Nothing has done a lot to make their headphones one stand out. They've got
40mm custom dynamic nickelplated drivers, comfy PU cushions that offer
pretty consistent mounting across a variety of head shapes, strong rated
battery life, and what's this? A return
to physical buttons instead of touch controls. My goodness, have you ever got
my attention there. They even worked with KE, a renowned audio brand, on the
tuning of the headphones. It's just too bad that KEF is mostly known for
speakers. And as it turns out from our Labs testing, which was done by none
other than DMS, that's unfortunately the one thing that
they kind of got wrong here, but it can be fixed. So, why don't we take a closer
look? Ooh, I like this carrying case. It's thin, so we can already tell that
they fold flat. And in terms of included accessories, we get a coba.
Wow. But what about second coba? One 3 and a
half mm cable and then a simple type-C to type-C USB 2 cable. Unfortunately,
this is just a three pole, so you can't use the mic over the cable, which is
sort of a downer. But the good news is that if you were going to plug in a
cable, you could just plug in the C cable and just use them wirelessly
because they do work while you are charging them. Now, let's take a look.
Oh, I like the feel of this as well. Very stylish. Very, very nothing. Oh,
these are kind of old school cool. I do
like you've got that kind of square cost
looking kind of vibe to them and yet
with what appears to be some kind of like um and is this polycarbonate? We
don't know. I'm getting the shrug, but boy does it ever look like it. At at any
rate, at any rate, it's very clear and at least to my fingernails, reasonably
scratch resistant. What a flipping vibe. And you know what?
To their credit, in spite of the fact that we've got like a blasted anodized
aluminum finish on all of this and all of this, they're not unreasonably heavy.
They also aren't nearly as light as nothing advertises them at. We tested on
two separate scales and found that they weigh about 60 g more than nothing
claims. But if you want to compare to something like, you know, the AirPods
Max or something like that, then this is downright reasonable. And speaking of
comparison to the AirPods Max, one of the things that we noticed that nothing
did really well is the adjustment
mechanism here. That's really nice.
Smooth. Basically, infinite adjustment this way.
And the way that they're managing the clamping pressure with this hinge here
resulted in very consistent mounting across our various setups. And I got to
say that is that is not bad considering that they're not coming all the way down
and putting pressure from the outside with a fork style mount like you would
see with a traditional headphone. It's kind of hard for you guys to see, but
like I've got a really good seal back there. The noise isolation is pretty
solid and they have active noise cancellation as well. Although it should
be noted that there is a significant impact on battery life from using it.
They rate it at 80 hours if you are not using ANC and about 35 once you've got
it switched on. Though that's obviously still well more than you could listen to
music in a single day. That's for sure.
They have the usual suite of features for their ANC. So, they do offer a
transparency mode as well as AI assisted
situational noise suppression, whatever.
We found that overall it was pretty good ANC, but didn't perform as well with
wind interference. Let's have a look at the interface, though, because this is
where I think nothing is going to be grabbing a lot of people's attention. No
swipes or gestures. Man, I still remember the first touchc controlled
headphones from Parrot of all people. I
told them, "Guys, I don't know if this is going to catch on," and I was wrong,
but maybe now I'm right. Uh, we've got a single button here. This by default is
bound to your voice assistant, if I recall correctly, but can be rebound
depending on you want from within the Nothing X app. You've got a roller here
with a bit of a rubberized texture on it that actually kind of reminds me of an
old school ball mouse. This is used for volume adjustment and oh, it's got a
little click. If you press and hold that, you can
toggle between the transparency and less
opacity modes. And then we've got a paddle here that can be used to advance
the track, reverse the track, or if you hold it, fast forward, and vice versa.
At the bottom, power switch, USBC for charging, as well as our 3 and 1/2 mm
jack. Oh, hey, I can I can actually count the noise cancelling mice here. It
looks like a total of three per side on the outside and then I've got to assume
there's at least one inside. Oh, I've also got what looks like a proximity
sensor in there. So, they should be able to tell if you have them on your ears or
if you are just wearing them stylishly around your neck looking so cool. Ignore
from the chin up and from the like collar bone down. Cool. The pads were a
strong point for us using a nice squishy PU foam that conforms well to your head
and rebounds very gently. And we found that there was a little bit more than
average depth from the point where it contacts your head to the point where
your ears um if you have wider ears tend to sit against the inside of headphones.
They also cushioned this space, which is a definite plus for me. I hate it when
like a hard piece of plastic is sitting right up against my earlobes. Ooh. Oh,
that's cool. Oh, that's cool. Okay.
When you pull them out wider, it's much harder to slip.
So, when there's no tension on it, it moves easily. And then when your head's
in it, you can see I can force it, but
it takes way more force. That's pretty
cool. Okay, good job. Nothing on that. Of course, this is all for nothing
if they don't sound good. And let's go ahead and give them a listen, shall we?
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sale. Right away, I can feel the ANC kick in, which it's not by any means.
It's not the worst sort of pressure feeling that I've ever felt, but I'm
definitely aware of it a little bit on these ones. I'd say it's on the better
side. Look at that. How awesome is that?
It's a little bit hidden away, but there's a dedicated pairing button. I
flipping love it cuz I hate having to look up the manual every time I want to
pair a pair of headphones. One device found. Boom. Connect. Done. Love to see
it. That's a cool sound effect when it switches to transparency mode. Not the
most natural sounding hearing of my own voice in transparency mode. That's This
is very last gen. Like it kind of sounds like I'm coming from inside of my skull.
Um, but what about when you guys talk? How does it sound when we talk? Testing
one, two. You guys sound great and very
natural. It's only my own voice that sounds like it's my own personal Darth
Vader talking inside my skull. Ah, I
really don't care about head tracking at all, but there you go. There's an
indicator that shows the direction my head is facing. I will turn that off
now. Cool. I'm just going to try them on their own first without the ANC. H based
on what I've seen so far from the frequency response curve, I will not
need the bass enhancement. And we'll stick with the balanced setting for the
EQ by default. This is a very reasonable set of quick actions with the
programmable button. That doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see more. I don't know,
launching an app or whatever the case may be. Answer and hang up calls with
the paddle. That I wouldn't have expected. I would expect that to be a
single press on the volume roller. I think there's a little bit more work
they have to do here in terms of the programmability of the various buttons.
Oh, and it has find my support. Oh, wait.
It's just to play a noise.
Would have been cool to see like a Google compatible, you know, Air Tag
equivalent tracker inside them or something like that, but baby steps, I
guess. All right, here we go. Let's start with a classic.
I don't really know how to describe these other than just kind of mid. What
does uh how much do they cost? Well, hold on. Hold on. No, let me guess. The
design is super cool, so I'm going to be paying a premium for that. That means
they're no less than 200 bucks. 200 bucks.
No one's told me. I've asked like 20 people. We don't know. Someone knows. We
now know they cost $300. Man, what is
it? It's like they have kind of like a like a, you know, H in the bass, but it
lacks precision right away. I find them
kind of fatiguing to listen to. And I've talked about this before. I'm a bit of a
Sennheiser veil boy. I don't love sparkly highs. So, here's the frequency
response curve for these as tested by DMS. And you're probably going to notice
that it looks a little bit different from the ones that we've shown you in the past. That's because the width of
this red range here represents the difference in the experience across a
variety of different head shapes. So depending on who you are, you might
experience the bass as anywhere from
within the desirable range to measurably
above the desirable range. But no matter who you are, you are likely to notice a
dip in the upper treble just below 10,000 hertz. And depending on who you
are, you might notice a pretty unpleasant spike just above 10,000
hertz. In a nutshell, they're not very flat. But that's not the end of the
world. Let's come back to their app for a second here because this might be the
saving grace for these headphones. Opening up the EQ, not only do we have
the simple EQ where I can go more bass, more treble, more voice or custom, I can
flip into advanced mode where I have a full parametric EQ. What this allows me
to do is select more than just, you know, whatever the default frequency
points are and turn them up and turn them down, but I can even adjust the
width of that adjustment as well as the
exact frequency. That is very
customizable. And they take it one step further. Once I've set that EQ, it is
actually stored on the headphones themselves. So I can take those
headphones and pair them to another device, say my computer, which doesn't
have the Nothing X app, and continue to take advantage of the tuning that I've
done. So with that in mind, DMS, give me your QR code.
Good gravy. That's what you had to do to
get this thing flat. Labs tune. Okay.
Well, let's listen to some tuned tunes,
shall we? Really enjoying the bass guitar more. What did you actually
change at the bass? Hold on. Kind of made it less muddy. Yeah, just just
demodified it. Like I can hear I
I can actually hear the baseline instead of just h I'm impressed at how much was
able to be done with the EQ. That is both the strongest selling point, you
know, the reason for these existing at all and also kind of the most
embarrassing thing about the development of it. I mean, they even went to the trouble of working with a third party to
tune these things and then we just had like one guy, you know, with a kind of
tacky hoodie that was able to make them sound this much better. But it means the
hardware is good. And if you start with good hardware, hey, you can fix it. Was
it pretty consistent across our three sets of headphones at least? Yes,
actually it was within two dec. Well, that's something too cuz that means that
they could actually roll out a fix broadly through firmware. Oh, I haven't
even tried out the ANC yet at a reasonable comfortable listening volume.
I already can't hear can't be bad basically from where we're
starting. Yeah, I can detect a little bit of pressure. So, I'm pretty sure
it's on right now. Can you guys like do some stuff or something? I can actually
feel them throwing things around or whatever it is they're doing in the
vibrations in the table, but I'm not able to detect any of it with my ears.
Can you take one of those tables and just like drag it around on the floor?
Try and create like a consistent noise to it. Okay, hold on. I'm going to Let's
play a game. I'm going to say whether you're dragging the table or not. Go.
Okay, that's a really really loud table drag.
Why don't we go with something a little more reasonable? How about um
Sure. play music in the background. Sure. Let's Let's try that. Nothing. Is
that loud? That's really loud. Yeah. Far
be it from me to try to, you know, objectively determine the strength of
the active noise cancellation or whatever just by sitting here listening to it. But what I can say is that I'd be
very unlikely to be bothered by typical ambient noise if I was listening to
music on these. And for me, that's pretty much the threshold. I don't even
know that a lot of the time if I was listening to music, I would even bother
turning on the ANC. There's one other key point from nothing. They claim 5
hours of non&c playback from just 5 minutes of charging and about 2 and 1/2
hours of&c playback with 5 minutes of charging. That's pretty darn useful if
you're the kind of person who forgets to charge your headphones overnight right
before you go on a trip and you're going to be on the plane. This guy. But other
than that, it's pretty much going to come down to price. We have seen rumors
that it could be around $300. And with the fixes to the frequency response
curve, actually, it looks very, very compelling at that price, especially
with this style. My good lord, they're
cool looking headphones. But if you don't want to put in the work to tune
them or if they start to get up closer to the $400 plus range, they become a
little bit harder to recommend. But what I can recommend is subscribing
to ShortCircuit.