Better than Expected! 🔥 Nothing Headphone (a) Review
The first thing that jumps out at me about the Nothing Headphone (a) is that rock solid battery life, quoted by Nothing as up to 135 Hours without noise canceling, but since I always use it with noise canceling, I got about 70 hours playing over AAC codec at 50% volume. That’s way above what most noise cancelers offer, which is usually within the range of 20-30 hours of juice. Here, you only have to charge it half as often.
Design’s pretty much the same as the Headphone (1). I happen to like it, but I’m aware that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Either way, it’s got great build quality and a very sturdy headband that can really flex.
Controls are fully tactile and super intuitive, comprising a wheel and paddle that controls volume, music playback and ambient modes. We also have a button which you can assign to various functions like calling up your favourite album on Apple Music.
All the settings are done on the Nothing X app, available on iOS and Android. It’s quite feature rich, pretty much covering everything we need in headphones including ambient settings, spatial audio, and EQ settings - both simplified and advanced.
Later on, I’m going to talk more about the EQ settings as well as their performance in terms of sound, mic pickup, noise canceling and transparency. Read on!
Microphone Quality
In terms of microphone quality, the Headphone (a) performed way beyond expectations. Clean and clear in quiet conditions, and in noisy windy conditions, it cancels background noise to almost nothing, while leaving my voice relatively intact, albeit a little softer and a bit muffled at certain times.
Active Noise Cancelling
For active noise canceling, the Headphone (a) is pretty effective, but it’s far from the best I’ve tried. Even compared to the flagship Headphone (1), it’s not quite as effective from the lower bass to mids region.
That covers traffic noises, rumbling noises in the train, the plane, and to a certain extent, human voices. It does, however, block the higher pitched noises better, so there’s a bit more of a muffling effect against keyboards, fans, and air conditioning.
Transparency Mode
Transparency mode is not the Headphone (a)’s strongest suit. Yes it’s pretty decent at passing through near-field ambient sounds, and it does have a good emphasis on voice passthrough so it’s quite usable for face to face conversations, but background ambience in general sounds quite dark and occluded, not very transparent. The Headphone (1) is not that much better, but it does amplify voices and ambience more so there’s a brighter feeling to transparency.
Sound Quality
In terms of sound quality on their default settings, the Headphone (a)’s tuning is somewhere along the lines of - having a V-shaped emphasis on bass and mids, but more boosted in the upper mids around 1khz to 3 khz.
I can sort of see what they’re going for, which is a more exciting, crisp tuning. But the upper mids are a bit too boosted, bordering on sibilance, and the lower mids need more body or fullness.
Bass has presence and by default it’s okay, but it’s also not very tight or clean, so at louder bass levels, it can come across as boomy. If you increase the bass levels, the boominess is even more pronounced, so I prefer to just turn off any bass boosting since by default, it sounds okay.
Track separation is pretty clean, and as for soundstaging, I would describe it as being laid back and open.
EQ Settings
Overall, it sounds decent but there’s room for improvement. And how I would improve it is by using its parametric EQ to pull back certain portions of its upper mids to smoothen out its sound, and by pulling back its upper bass to prevent the bass from blooming into the mids.
Here’s my EQ settings in case you’re interested, but if you prefer to work the Advanced EQ yourself, word of advice, don’t push anything too high, because the DSP will strangle the rest of the tuning to keep things ‘balanced’. For that reason, I would describe these headphones as tunable, but only to a certain extent. But if you want to do it the easy way, there’s always the Simplfied EQ settings. There are presets, and the dials are super easy, just bass mids and treble.
Cushions
What can be better is the comfort. In this area, it’s similar to the Headphone (1). Cushions are plush, but a little stiff around the jaw, and the headband is quite thin with only a little bit of padding. It’s not a problem for me but those with close-cropped hair might feel a bit more pressure on their noggins. For me, it is comfortable enough to wear for long stretches, but with some breaks in between.
Also, their cushions, as with the Headphone (1), cannot officially be replaced. Although it is possible to remove them if you brute force it, I was informed by the local representative of Nothing that they don’t even sell replacement cushions.
Conclusion
Overall do I like the Headphone (a)?
Well, aside from its fantastic battery life, I also like the fact that its mic quality is awesome, and it’s quite feature rich. I mean it’s got most of the things that people want in headphones, so for the price you pay, you won’t feel like you’re missing anything, from App support to multipoint pairing, Hi-Res codec support, it also has a rather capable parametric EQ which is not something we often see in wireless headphones. Most headphones now have a simple graphic EQ which doesn’t allow you to select a specific frequency, let alone setting the Q-factor.
Performance-wise, it’s a little above average, for most people it’s going to be acceptable given the price they’re paying for this. And this is coming from someone who uses some of the top wireless headphones almost on a daily basis.
Check their latest prices:
Nothing Headphone (a) - https://amzn.to/4mnm1Yl
Nothing Headphone (1) - https://amzn.to/41uey05
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