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 trade-offs can be a little bit hit or miss,
but we're hoping that all of the trade-offs are gonna be the right ones for their new budget headphone offering,
the Nothing Headphone 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, because it looks like a fried egg on your ear. We can only open one today, though,
and which one's that gonna be, boys? White! Well, you know what,
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.
Okay, let's take a look. Voila.
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. Well, 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
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 millimeter. I don't have a lot of faith in the strain relief on these cables, honestly.
I, previous Nothing Products, I've always kind of been underwhelmed with,
though I do like the unique very square. It's interesting because it's kind of like
the similar design motif to how they have the like squircle,
squectangle, swectangle,
the round in the square shape. It's just, it's neat. I do really appreciate Nothing's design language.
I just wanna check if the cables are colored, matched.
They're all white. That's okay. There's worse things in my life.
Is there like a plastic peel on this? There's like a seam.
They see like very faint, this faint outline that my fingers are going along. Oh yeah.
On the outside of these, I can 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 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 cause they're square. Speaking of which, the ear cups are made of some sort of,
I wouldn't even go so far as to call it like faux leather
cause 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 millimeter port.
Something to note is that while you can listen to audio via the USB-C,
if you wanna listen to the audio via 3.5 millimeter, you do have to have these on.
There's no passive listening, so they will use battery if you're using the 3.5 millimeter 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 millimeter. 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, Rock and Roller?
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,
which would be Rock and Roller. This is where you're gonna find your volume settings as well as pressing for play and pause.
Also on the right ear cup is a multi-function button. We're probably gonna 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 kind of weird silicone pad.
It's not the nicest. Yes, Prime Minister, what's that?
The material is 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 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 earphones 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 like, it's weird.
What I do find is that it causes these to 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 it should just pull off with magnets. Oh, and look at that.
There is some sort of flashes of pink also on the inside. That's cool.
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 feels destructive.
There's not a pleasurable experience. It took a lot of effort. Yeah, you just kind of gotta 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 two hours, but if you need a quick top up,
you can plug them in for five minutes and you will then get five 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. 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 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.
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 cue 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,
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.
You also have a decent control customization. You can put a lot of different stuff on your button,
including press and holds and on your roller and on your paddle,
though there's a couple of 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 the 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 that 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 that, I think that the treble reproduction is good, if not a little bit peaky,
but 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 EQ? I think you could.
I bet she 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 is 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 by 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.
Now that this is guaranteed, you always have to give it a listen to tell if you really like it.
But 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 were 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 codecs, 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're really like this 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'll block out a lot of noise in a noisy office.
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.