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

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but Nothing has been kind of on a tear lately, making awesome, really cool,

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and relatively well-priced audio products,

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especially with their 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 trade-offs can be a little bit hit or miss,

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but we're hoping that all of the trade-offs are gonna be the right ones for their new budget headphone offering,

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the Nothing Headphone A. In front of me, I have three of the four

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Nothing Headphones A colorways, we got white, black, pink, but we don't have the yellow,

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which I kind of like, because it looks like a fried egg on your ear. We can only open one today, though,

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and which one's that gonna be, boys? White! Well, you know what,

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cause you caught me in such a good mood, we're gonna unbox all of them, but we're gonna listen to just the white ones.

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Okay, let's take a look. Voila.

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Okay. I was kind of expecting these to have maybe a different color in the white parts,

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

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

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

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

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We have a bag. Well, I do appreciate that we get a bag,

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you know, something to carry our headphones in that isn't just the packaging it came in.

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I am a little disappointed that it's not a full case

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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,

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and one 3.5 millimeter. I don't have a lot of faith in the strain relief on these cables, honestly.

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I, previous Nothing Products, I've always kind of been underwhelmed with,

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though I do like the unique very square. It's interesting because it's kind of like

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the similar design motif to how they have the like squircle,

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squectangle, swectangle,

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the round in the square shape. It's just, it's neat. I do really appreciate Nothing's design language.

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I just wanna check if the cables are colored, matched.

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They're all white. That's okay. There's worse things in my life.

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Is there like a plastic peel on this? There's like a seam.

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They see like very faint, this faint outline that my fingers are going along. Oh yeah.

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On the outside of these, I can see a lot of mixed feelings about how they look.

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I think they kind of lose the kind of cool,

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flashy complexity of the normal Nothing Headphones.

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And I would feel like the big plastic chunks in the middle

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kind of just make these look a little cheap compared to like the cool designs that show through

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on the actual like clear plastic areas. It also makes them a lot bigger than they need to be.

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Like, look at how much bigger they are than their ear cups, just cause they're square. Speaking of which, the ear cups are made of some sort of,

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I wouldn't even go so far as to call it like faux leather

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cause it doesn't even really attempt to feel

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like actual leather. It's very much like a silicone kind of,

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it's a very interesting texture with a decent amount of cushion and a decent amount of depth for your ears.

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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,

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a USB-C port and a 3.5 millimeter port.

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Something to note is that while you can listen to audio via the USB-C,

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if you wanna listen to the audio via 3.5 millimeter, you do have to have these on.

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There's no passive listening, so they will use battery if you're using the 3.5 millimeter jack.

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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

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while you're listening via 3.5 millimeter. On the right ear cup, we have our rocker

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that allows you to skip tracks or fast forward through them. And you have your roller.

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We got a rocker and a roller. Do you remember that movie, Rock and Roller?

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I don't, I've never seen it, but I do remember all the ads because it would come on the TV for five seconds,

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which would be Rock and Roller. This is where you're gonna find your volume settings as well as pressing for play and pause.

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Also on the right ear cup is a multi-function button. We're probably gonna take a look at their app

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to just see exactly what everything can do. On the left headphone, you get nothing, sorry lefties,

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but you can also see venting for microphones. Oh, another secret button.

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You will not believe how long it took me to find this when I was trying to pair these.

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

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

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the whole loadout for these nothing phones. Like it's such an easy headphone to control.

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You're not like doing a crazy bunch of multi-presses

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to do things. It's pretty nice. The headband has a smooth adjustment

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and has this kind of weird silicone pad.

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It's not the nicest. Yes, Prime Minister, what's that?

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

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Love you, bye. The way this mechanism adjusts,

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I might worry about getting hairs caught in it or it causing like kind of pressure points

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for people who have maybe larger heads. I personally didn't find too many issues with it.

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For the earphones you have swivel that can go all the way flat for storage.

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And you have some kind of spring-loaded tilt that it's really, it's like, it's weird.

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What I do find is that it causes these to have a bit of clamping pressure that people may not enjoy so much.

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I did not find these to be particularly comfortable. I found that they got a little bit warm.

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When I put them on, I can really tell they're kind of hugging my ear the whole time.

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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 it should just pull off with magnets. Oh, and look at that.

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There is some sort of flashes of pink also on the inside. That's cool.

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With the pink ones, you can see through to the driver housing a little bit better.

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Dude, non-removable ear cups is kind of bad. I see screws underneath the ear cups when I bend them.

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These really 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 feels destructive.

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

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But 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.

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The battery life that they claim is 62 to 135 hours,

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

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This has the LDAC audio codec.

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So if you're somebody who cares about having really high quality audio connection,

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even if it comes at the cost of battery life, well, you got it.

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They do by default only use AAC.

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I would have loved to see maybe some of the Qualcomm codecs,

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but getting LDAC is pretty cool on a lower priced set of cans.

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They also have Google fast pair for easy adding to any sort of Android device.

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These charge to full in two hours, but if you need a quick top up,

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you can plug them in for five minutes and you will then get five more hours of audio playback,

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

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

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So the only thing there is to do is take a listen to what's inside and that's audio, good sound, hopefully.

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I'll let you know after this message from our sponsor. I can report that the pairing process was pretty smooth

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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 don't find that it's causing

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any sort of like pressure sensation or anything like that. ANC on the whole has gotten a lot better

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

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

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And I think that nothing has a great companion app. There's easy control over the noise cancellation settings

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from the level of noise cancellation that you want, adaptive mode, transparency mode,

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or thank you, the ability to just turn it off. And when it's off,

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these honestly have pretty decent isolation.

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

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And I don't really know what the difference is, but it's usually off.

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You also get access to a full parametric equalizer.

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You can use a simple equalizer or use pre-made profiles, but you can go to each of these bands

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and adjust not just how loud or quiet you want each of these sections of the audio spectrum to be,

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but you can also adjust the cue factor, which changes how steeply the audio is curved

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for that specific frequency. It's really cool. And that means that if you have any sort of problems

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with these headphones, you can dial in your preference as you please.

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And you can even scan a QR code or make a QR code to share your equalization preferences

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to make sure that you can get a headphone that sounds good to you or to share with your friends,

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because you have so many friends when you're EQing headphones, I'm sure. That's not fair. I have friends that I EQ headphones.

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You also have a decent control customization. You can put a lot of different stuff on your button,

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

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

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but that's okay. But with how much you can customize most of the other controls

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and how much you can control easily on this headphone,

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

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

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so you don't have to deal with the like, kind of like shaky handoff like Bluetooth 5.4

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does technically support like multi-point connection, but it's really, really clumsy.

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The dual connection on this app makes it work a lot better.

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But that's enough about the app. Let's give these things a listen.

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Okay, so these are kind of weird.

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On the one 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.

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It's weird and it kind of shows up in a lot more like acoustic or like rock stuff.

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

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

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and you losing detail in the mids so that they like cranked down the low mids or something.

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

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Outside that, I think that the treble reproduction is good, if not a little bit peaky,

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but it kind of feels like it has enough sparkle to be like more attention grabbing.

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It's more of a V shape, but I'm just kind of really weirded out

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by what they did with the bass. Could you bring it back with EQ? I think you could.

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I bet she we could. In fact, actually I already did. I took a little bit of time,

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spent some time with the EQ to bring it back. And I think that these sound a lot better.

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And that's, this is exactly why the EQ is awesome.

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Because if I find that these headphones aren't up to my preference, then I can just kind of fix that.

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And what I did was improved that like weird scoop

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in the low mids and things feel a little bit more lively without feeling bloated.

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Though these are still kind of a bass heavy headphone. I'm still kind of impressed by the ANC honestly.

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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,

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they will hold whatever your previous settings were when you were connected to the app,

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which can be good or bad. But what does Labs have to say?

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Let's see if I was spot on with this. Okay, interesting.

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Wow, the charts look really 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

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of what most people would think sounds good. The red is the difference in our test results

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across tests and different testing apparatuses.

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So you kind of have an idea of the range of where these headphones may fall, depending on your head.

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Now that this is guaranteed, you always have to give it a listen to tell if you really like it.

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But I think for me, this graph looks worse than it sounds.

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That scoop in the mid-bass does really, really harm the music out of the box.

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And the treble peaks that I was talking about were 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 very different experience,

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which is exactly why. You can EQ in the app. But I think that we shouldn't really be expecting

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a lot of people to do that, nothing. We should be trying to release the best headphones we can.

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

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from the budget, nothing brand, CMF. Yeah, Labs really didn't like it.

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Labs notes, this sounds bad, just straight up bad.

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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.

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I don't think it was that awful. And the EQ I was able to put on it fixed a lot of the problems,

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but 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,

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getting access to multiple codecs, getting Bluetooth 5.4.

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The battery life on these is supposed to be killer, as well as having a pretty capable ANC.

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They're 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 don't really know what went wrong.

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But maybe if you find these on sale, or you're really like this style, and you like the rest of the features,

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you can fiddle with the EQ to find something that will make these sound a lot better.

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$200 for headphones that'll block out a lot of noise in a noisy office.

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If you don't care that much about sound quality, then you have a lot of other options

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that can also do decent ANC, have decent features from cheap brands.

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Like Soundcore, for example, has a lot of stuff that's competitive under the $200 price point.

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Maybe they can fix the sound, or maybe you can fix the sound yourself. All I know is that we can't fix

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the fact that we're at the end of the video. So thank you so much for watching.

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If you enjoyed this, why don't you check out Linus's unboxing

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of the cheaper CMF headphones. I don't know what he thought specifically,

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but from what I've read, apparently they were pretty decent.