On the surface, the sales pitch for the headphone Pro by CMF by Nothing is not
that compelling. It's got an AI button. Oh, goody. It features expressive
modular design, which as far as I can tell means you can change out the ear
cups. And it has a slider that takes the
sound signature from a little on the bass-heavy SIDE TO OH MY GOD, WHAT WERE
THEY THINKING? But if we look a little deeper, we might find a very compelling
feature set at a shockingly reasonable price. $84 at the time of filming. That
is with 40 mm nickel-plated drivers, LDAC and hi-res certification for its
Bluetooth connectivity, up to 100 hours of playback, and they even claim 8 hours
of playback on just a 5-minute quick charge, although you can cut those
numbers in half if you're using active noise cancellation. Oh, did I mention
active noise cancellation and probably my favorite part, a hyper-personalized
listening experience that Apple only wishes they could deliver to their
customers. Yes, I'm still upset about the AirPods Pro 3s. Included in the box
you will find ah, yes, instructions to install the Nothing X app. What else we
got going on here? The headphones themselves. Am I going to need
instructions for the detachable ear cups here that uh
transform my headphones into an extension of my personality, giving me
the freedom to adapt colors to match my mood and create a look that's uniquely
mine, as long as that look is uh What were the colors available? Green and
orange? For the ear cups? Ah, yes, uniquely mine though. I may need
instructions. Oh, I don't. Look at that. See, other
headphone manufacturers, it could be that easy. Sorry, I'm getting ahead of
myself a little bit. Oh, look, they can include a cable.
In this case, a 3 and 1/2 mm cable, but
no charging Wow, that's an odd choice.
Truly malicious compliance. Oh, we have to include everything you need to use
the product? How about this archaic jack that you no longer have a device in your
pocket that uses? Got them. I hate how quickly my
expectations of a complete accessory package have turned into well, a 3 and
1/2 mm cable and a carrying sleeve is more than Apple gave me. Anyway, let's
have a look at the interface. On the right we find our USB-C charging port,
our smart assistant button, which from my understanding can be remapped within
the Nothing X app, which they claim offers the same functionality across
both Android and iOS, which is definitely a plus, as well as our volume
wheel, and one of the external shielded microphones to help with noise
cancellation. Over on the other side, we've got another mic, 3 and 1/2 mm
jack, indicator LED that does indicates
the battery status if you press the power button. Very neat. Power button,
as well as the bass slider, and a final
exterior microphone. In terms of build quality overall, it manages to feel
pretty plasticky even though it uses metal for the headband adjustment
mechanism, but not any more so than I would expect from a headphone that's
priced honestly even significantly higher than this. At $100, I'm feeling
pretty good about my purchase, especially looking at like the quality
of the foam that they're using on the ear cups. As I mentioned before, I don't
love super skinny headbands, but at least they had the foresight to actually
put some cushioning in it. And they've also taken the design approach of
applying a slightly higher clamping pressure to give you a good seal and to
take some of the pressure off of your dome. Honestly, they feel not bad.
They're somehow kind of on the heavy side for feeling plasticky, but
not unreasonable at all. Like this ain't no AirPods Max or whatever. AirPods Max?
those things, man. They're so heavy.
How should I try them first? With the bass slider all the way up or with it
all the way down? We're going full webs to start. Decent isolation, and I don't
even have the ANC on yet. Let's power these up. After this message from our
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Check it out today. Wow, look at that. Immediately prompted to grab the app and
install it just from these being on and in pairing mode nearby. Isn't that
great? It's not quite the AirPods experience, but pretty solid. Mm,
hold to switch active noise cancellation modes. I think it was on by default, but
let's go ahead and give it a quick try. Yes, it was on by default. Not the
greatest transparency mode I've ever heard, but one of the most challenging
things to do is have your own voice sound natural to you through your
headphones transparency mode. So, does one of you want to maybe say something? Hey, Lance. How you doing? Actually,
much better than my own voice. So, cool.
Kind of a mushy button. Can't say that that's my favorite, but
gets the job done. And not a ton of the pressure effect of having the ANC on.
They're no AirPods Pro 3s. I mean, nothing is. Well, nothing isn't, but
See, damn it, Carl Pei. Why did you name
your company this? Okay, it doesn't matter. The point is, seems good so far,
but not industry leading. Okay, press this button to activate your voice assistant. No, I don't think I ever
will. Detachable ear cushions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've done that.
Wait, update available. Ah. Okay, firmware update. This is good.
This is good. One moment, please. ANC seems really solid though.
Yeah, no, like solid. Nothing claims a 40 decibel reduction overall if you use
their ANC. It's pretty remarkable to see how far active noise cancellation has
come. I mean, just a few short years ago, something this good would have been
like, oh yeah, man, Bose is so good at noise cancellation, nobody comes close.
Excuse me, but that doesn't make got randos like Nothing coming out for $84
with what is would have blown my mind not that long
ago. My firmware update's done. Three levels of noise cancellation, including
their adaptive noise cancellation, which will monitor the environment around you.
And there's plenty of other things to like about Nothing's companion app. You can play around with your spatial audio
settings, which personally I'm not that into, or you can dig into yes, my
friends, their personal sound profiler, which takes just a few minutes
apparently, and why don't we do that? Or their extremely in-depth EQ. Like, man,
they are pretty much setting the standard as far
as I can tell for personalizing the audio experience both automatically and
also giving you the manual adjustments that you might want if you're an
audiophile or if you have more particular tastes. Is what I would say,
except that whether it's because they didn't partner with KEF on the tuning or
because they want to differentiate their higher-end products, they only support a
basic EQ with a couple of modes and the
ability to kind of broadly drag bass, treble, and mids around. There's no
parametric EQ on these headphones. With
that said, I'm still expecting the experience to be pretty good because we
do still get their personal sound profiler, which we can go through and
set up now. Okay, here we go.
Cool. And the best part is it stores this profile on the device themselves.
So, whatever app you're using or whatever device you're using, you should
be good to go. With that enabled and a flat setting in the basic EQ, there's
not much else to show here. As always, I wish there was the ability to just fully
customize what things do with the single press or press and hold, but like this
energy slider, if I could just have it make like a slide whistle noise in my ear, that
would probably be more useful than tuning the bass for how much energy I'm
feeling right now. To be clear, it's not the first time I've encountered this
gimmick, and I even was positive about it back in the day when I was rocking my
IE80 in-ears that had the little dial on them for how much bass, but in practice,
I never used it then and I'm never going to use it now. I don't think I care
about low lag mode right now. Don't need dual connection, and that's about it.
Let's give them a shot, shall we?
Wow, that's without spatial audio on, eh? I was convinced for a very brief
moment that I accidentally was listening to my cell phone. Not in terms of the
the quality, it was just the initial like crackle crackle crackle crackle at the beginning, so not critiquing that,
but woah.
With the bass slider all the way up, they are
comically bass-heavy.
I don't know how much of this is going to translate, man, but like, can you
hear that, brother? Let's turn them down now because as you
can see from the helpful frequency response graph that you're looking at
that was created by the lab in collaboration with DMS, if we
dial them all the way back down, we actually get pretty close to what would
be the average expected preference range. Yeah.
Now they're not overpowering. They don't have anything to prove to the person
who's just trying to enjoy sitting in in their car and having a conversation with
the person in the passenger seat as they roll up with their arm on the window and
they're like going like this like, "Notice me. Please notice me, you know?"
Nothing to prove with the slider down. Ooh.
Not loving the granularity on the volume slider. I was just trying to dial it in
to, you know, something appropriate to stick up to the mic, and it's off or
loud enough that it would not be easy for me to
talk over them. And they don't have any kind of automatic conversation mode or
anything like that.
You got to give them credit. The slider does what it says on the tin and as far
as overpowering bass goes, at least it's
reasonably well controlled. Like I've heard sloppier. All right, let's get
some thoughts on the microphone because while the speakers themselves sound
Honestly, surprisingly good considering that these
are again $84, right? With active noise
cancellation, with solid claims of battery life and reasonable build
quality. So, an easy area for them to cheap out would have been on the
microphone. Let's give my wife a call. Hello, wife. Okay.
She needs a second. Really great call clarity. Oh, hey, sorry. I just wanted
to try out this microphone and you were the first person I thought of to call.
That's nice, she says. Oh, okay. Getting an update on the honey-do
list. She wants me to go get some headphones and water bottles from her
office. How's my microphone though? Does it stand out in any way whatsoever? Very
clear. Okay, but hold on a second. Just riddle me this.
Too clear? It's hurting your ear. Oh, I mean you do crank your earpiece volume.
Like I'll accidentally take a call on her phone sometimes and the other person I'M
LIKE, "OH, LORDY." In many words, she said the dynamic range is pretty good,
but there's a little bit of cutting out sometimes. I mean that could be your connection at home though. Our cell
signal there is not very good. Okay, now that I've just got you on my regular speakerphone, what how would you compare
this? Before, it didn't sound like you were talking to me on a
Like it sounded almost too clear. And now when it's on speakerphone, you
sound more like you're talking to me on a phone. How about if we just compare to the on-device microphone on the Pixel?
Oh, yeah. That sounds more like talking to me on a phone. So, you would take the
headphones over either the speakerphone or talking directly into the handset?
Got it. I don't know if you guys heard that. Yes, in terms of quality and
clarity, but phone sound is familiar to us millennials, so we might have a
subconscious preference for it. Thanks, my lady. Just a couple more things to
cover off. They're IPX2, so they should be resistant to some light perspiration
or precipitation, but nothing too heavy. I wouldn't go swimming with them on and
as for the looks, I haven't really commented on them much because I got to
be honest with you guys. I I don't really rock the cans, if you know what
I'm saying. So, I'll leave that to the folks who are kind of into them. Hey, at
least they're not just another, you know, black headband and black cushions
that you wear on the side of your head. So, you got to give them credit for at
least doing something a little bit different. As for whether to consider
purchasing these, honestly, Labs team
really loves the values, describing them as kind of an AKG K371, but wireless and
at a lower price, which is Honestly, a pretty good sales pitch.
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