earbuds are great and compact but there's a reason why I'm always walking
around with a big set of headphones I don't like the feeling of my ears being
plugged and I get irritation from having
stuff in my ears but there's something in between big bulky headphones and
compact earbuds and that's open earbuds these don't go in your canals instead
they sit outside of your ear like this the issue is that they can kind of sound
like garbage but nothing thinks they figured it out with the ear open they
promise a great sound set of headphones that are also provide all of the
benefits of open earbuds at the very least they look pretty dang cool uh
there's a QR code of course it looks stylish and there is so going be like a
USBC cable for charging and there is a
nice short USBC cable and just in case
you needed another USBC Cable in your life they got an instruction manual this
might not be the most compact way to store these I'm kind of surprised they
didn't go for like more of a nested option even this feels like it's a
little more pocketable I have pretty big Pockets but let's let's let's try are
those the nothing buds or are you just Happ to see me a lot of the time you're
going to end up with really bulky cases and this is might be actually nicer case
is is plastic with a magnetic hinge it's got an indicator LED that will tell you
the state for charging as well as for pairing and these are held in place by
simple magnets and they connect to Pogo pin so pretty typical they look pretty
dang cool I still love the fact that they're going with the clear design like
you can see the layers of pcbs which are really cool uh you can also kind of see
the the driver in the back I will say one of the downsides of these is that
they are white and the color of this white is going to be different than the
color of the plastic white on the inner earbud quickly the ear hooks are a nice
Soft Touch silicone they're not like firm metal though they just kind of have
like some spring in them to go back but they're not the kind of thing that you're going to shape and reposition
that means you might have some issues with getting a good fit compared to
firmer armed headphones honestly they're they're pretty comfortable and the nice
thing is it feels like I don't have anything in my ears cuz I kind of don't as you can see they just sit in front of
my beautiful ears people have always complimented me on my ears keep doing it
in the comments below I also think wonder if these are going to be a
problem for glasses users they feel like they're going to fall
off shake your head they're not yeah they're on there
but it does feel very precarious yeah they claim 8 hours of battery life and
this guy right here and with the case you get a total of 30 which is going to
be plenty for pretty much any listening session that you'll be doing and if you
need to do a quick little recharge it just takes 10 minutes to get 2 hours of
playback time I think it's kind of funny how they've branded some things uh like
they call this open Sound technology just because it doesn't go in your ears
which is honestly uh a benefit because people like cyclists often when they're
on a commute they might want to have some music playing but they also need to be aware of their surroundings L they
get hit by a car because we have gnarly bike infrastructure that doesn't allow cyclists to be safe not only not only do
they have open Sound technology but you're also going to have sound seal
technology because you I don't get their sound seal
technology is not actually a seal of any sort it's just a directional speaker
that they've put in here apparently these are angled at a 50° angle so it
tries to shoot basically straight into your ear canal so that this has a
minimum amount of bother for people around you say if you're listening to
these at your desk and you don't want to bug your co-workers or you have a very
private phone call they say soundwaves at the front and the back back of the
bud cancel each other out I think that that probably means they're using some
sort of active noise cancellation but we'll try and figure that out later but
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description let's get listening I want to check this out cuz if I open them
like this do they just do the auto pairing thing hey okay sweet they got
that the Quick Connect that is awesome on Android feels like magic oh it's a
pinch mechanism single pinch play pause answer and hangup calls double pinch
skip forward decline incoming call Triple pinch skip back pinch and hold
right volume up left volume down that's all we're in the app and they got an
equalizer which I love to see you can use your band equalizer you can use you
can set custom frequencies that's so nice so many equalizers are like you
just get what you get you get 12 bands and you don't have any say oh
you can even adjust the Q factor which controls the shape of your curve I'm
going to set them to default so that I don't screw anything up but that's great
I'm so happy that they actually uh implemented like a fully featured
equalizer no one else does this and then you still have simple if you if you
aren't super picky which is amazing this it's that easy it's that easy everybody
should be doing this especially brands that have a background in high-end audio
Sennheiser doesn't do this focal doesn't do this Sony doesn't do this nothing's
actually listening to what the Nerds want looking through it if you tap them
you can see all of the different controls you can modify the controls I
wish that you could modify every part of the controls they do limit certain
options depending on it so like the double pinch can only be skipped
backwards skip forward and voice AI which apparently is you get chat GPT
with these I appreciate the level of customization and you can also see your
case power and your headphone battery power they also have a low latency mode
which gets the latency below 12 120 milliseconds which is like not really
that impressive it's better than uh being
above 120 milliseconds uh that's for sure thanks to having Bluetooth 5.3 you
get all of those features as well as potential future features like orac cast
but don't buy anything based on future features enough about the app let's just
take a listen ah yes Library the only album in here Seas of cheese by Primus
can you hear what I'm listening to I cannot or is it directed directly into
my ears can you hear it no I can't hear anything I can't hear you I'm too let me
turn it down a little First Impressions is they sound pretty good but there's something that is really really
important and that's that that even just slight adjustments to how these are
positioned on your ears will have a massive effect on the sound the
difference between this and this is a
noticeable change in sound and you're probably going to do that just from
adjusting for comfort so your experience and my experience listening could vary
massively just because of the shapes of our ears so remember that fact as we go
into the testing numbers that we got from our friends at headphones.com
thanks guys starting at the low end of our frequency response chart you can see
that there's very little subbase and that's basically the consequence of just
not having a good seal however as you get up to the 100 HZ region you have a
decent Basse response and I agree it's enough to get the job done to
communicate most of the sound that you're going to be hearing from instruments and it does a great job in
the mid-range but that tinniness that I mentioned kind of pops up and you can
see that in these peaks in the high end around 5 khz and 9 khz it uh ends up
making a little bit of a bright sound that they can make it sound a little cheap and maybe even irritating if you
have particular sensitivities to frequencies in those ranges basically
this is the kind of shape that we'd expect from headphones like these though you can see that there's a lot of
variants across the different testing they did the purple line is going to be
the average of all the tests the gray lines are the recordings from each
individual test thankfully they did include that really in-depth equalizer
so you could tailor this to sound the
best for you but you're probably not ever going to have any real success in
with the subbase for me these sound I
would say good maybe they're a little Hollow in the top end a little tiny
decent Basse response that is until you turn the volume up and there's a point
where they just can't add more base and the only thing that they add is more
treble which in the context of you're trying to use these out and about or in
a louder area and maybe you're trying to take a call that's okay because you're
going to hear the details of speech but it just music at the top volume just
sounds bad when you have a nice tight seal it is easier to produce good Bas
frequencies that's why closed back headphones and say airpods Pro will have
a better base response on something that doesn't seal like airpods normal or
these Let's test those claims about privacy and sound leakage uh B you want
to come over here 30% volume but it's we're not in the main part of the song
we're just going to wait a little bit we'll skip to the lyrics I can hear a
little bit but nothing I you make out what the song is I couldn't make out what song it is okay I'm going to turn
up we're at about 50% volume
you know this song yeah if I was sitting next on the bus I wouldn't be upset like
it's not that loud but here's the thing is that it's not very loud in my ears
like if I if I was on the bus I don't
know if I would be able to really hear much over the sound of the bus cuz if I
get louder that's when I get to the point where the bass drops off and now
it's and now it's just like it doesn't sound very good I can hear everything
very clearly now this is a test recording of the nothing ear open I hope
they sound good if I go s huh right
or how do they sound let me know overall
what do I think I think that if you are somebody looking for a pair of open
earbuds these are a good option I appreciate the features that they pack
they also are rated for ip54 Ingress Protection so pretty nice you could wear
them when your work out 150 bucks I think there really are something
that you need to try I would not give a recommendation because everyone's ears
are shaped different these might not be the product for you are they a bad value
absolutely not I think they're a pretty decent product for what they are but do
not blindly buy them and throw away the receipt but you know what you can throw
away the receipt on this video cuz it's over if you like this video why don't
you check out our coverage on the shocks headphones