When I first heard of Nuraphones, I saw discussions over forums and youtube videos on how the product is with innovative design of in & over ear cup design, which is patented as InovaTM. The new out of box concept have in ear buds that provides you crisp, clear sound while the over ear cups work to pump in BASS in your ears. So lets get into detailed review of Nuraphone ANC Headphones with Pros and Cons.
First Look
First look of this product gave me somewhat Industrial feeling. But I liked it.
Product looks very well designed with great build quality.
It has a metal headband with Little bit of plastic at top and silicon underneath for wearing comfort.
One important thing to remember is that they don’t fold flat! hence the footprint is too big!! You need to carry large carrying case along with you, so I feel it more suitable for home or office listening where you need not carry the whole carrying case around!
Surely it will not be possible to get into your backpack! so forget about hiking with them!!
The carry case lid gets locked with a magnetic latch, and inside you have a magnetic holder for included wires and ear-tips.
Wearing comfort
The design is somewhat weird! What I mean is that its a composition of in ear and over ear headphones!!
So when you wear them, you feel like wearing earphones and then putting one more headphone over them.
However the the ear-tips do not jam into your ear canals like typical earbuds do, they rest and seals the outside of ear canal.
The ear cups are large in size and covers the complete ears, with extra soft rubber inside which fits around the ear comfortably. The so called “ear bud” inside the cup also made of soft rubber, fits perfectly.
The cups are adjustable and you will be able to move them up or down to fit the head size perfectly,
However adjustment of headband leaves a protruding metal band outside on right ear! which I didn’t like.
Also due to weight they tend to slip slightly during bending movements.. One more problem is that when I want to adjust the headband, then I need to touch the set button, which obviously changes the settings! this is not good design in my opinion, so with due care you need to adjust the headbands.
Clamping force exerted on head is comfortable however the 329 grams are quite weight to carry for long period of time
Specially I liked that the ear-cups do not heat like typical earphones, this is due to the TeslaFlow valves in the nuraphone‘s ear cups which pull cool air in and push warm air out, keeping you cool and comfortable.
Nuraphone ANC Headphone – Pros and Cons – REVIEW
Sound Quality
First and most important thing why you should go for Nuraphone ANC headphones is the Extraordinary Sound Quality. Sound delivery is indeed very immersive and deep.
In short, Nuraphones definitely out perform Bose and Sony when it comes to fidelity.
This is mainly due to the ability to understand and build personal profile which suits the physics of ear canals & response, I will come to details of precisely how it works later in this post.
– Compared to Bose QC35 II, Nuraphones produce quite true sound
– Nuraphones surely provides an immersive sound experience and you can wear it for hours without any fatigue
– Its unique personal sound profile works excellent
– Everything is very well balance, clean detailed, highly accurate sound profile
– Soundstage is good .. every instrument note is separate and identifiable, giving feeling of something bigger around you
– No listening fatigue for hours of experience .. no numbness .. no exhausting .. keep listening for hours
– Immersion feature of the App works exceptionally well at the lower end of scale
Personalization of sound signature – your own hearing profile
The nura app creates a unique hearing profile that represents how you hear.
Your hearing profile has a colour which helps you to quickly recognize that the profile belongs to you.
The shape of the profile contains all the information about your relative hearing sensitivity to different tones.
The App default is generic mode.
How nurasoundTM works?
The nuraphone automatically learns how you hear and creates your unique hearing profile.
Thus you can experience your favorite music tuned only for you! No one have even though this before.
It changes thee way you hear and feel the music.
The process of learning
The nuraphone learns the way you hear. This is how it does.
The App plays a range of beeps and tones into the ear, this in tern bounces back from ear, and the system catches the faint sound wave reflected from your ear system which is called as the Otoacoustic Emission (OAE).
The OAE signal gets originated in the cochlea and vibrates the ear drum, turning it into a speaker and playing sound back out of your ear which is about 10,000 times smaller than the sound that went in.
Now the algorithm analyses the reflected wave information to understand the way you heard the sound that went in.
This is achieved using an extremely sensitive microphone which sends this signal to a self learning algorithm which generated unique profile only for you.
All the above process takes around 60 seconds.
Now when you listen to any music, the waves are shaped sonically using your profile information, so that it matches your hearing system and delivers all the detail of the music your ear system is made for.
In short —
– it provides series of beeps which analyzes your personal profile
– it uses outer ear drivers to create bass experience
– rumble of bass is seriously great feeling,.. you must experience it yourself, its like you must try it on your own,,, just can’t be described over a text
– the bass is super aggressive and pushing you to listen more and more
its like you are in a recording studio .. listening to huge stage performance . sitting in the middle of the orchestra..
I think you must feel it yourself …
Phone call [Improved Voice Calls]
As far as company claims, these headphones are designed to deliver crisp and clear voice calls with great clarity even in most noisy environments.
As per practical testing, its OKAY, but not awesome quality of call.
The person on the other end do not hear to the call in a crystal clear way, specially the headphones do pick sound from noisy environment.
Good thing is that the sound does not leak outside during conversation, means the passive noise isolation works well due to duel ring type design
Active Noise Cancellation(ANC)
ANC works exceptionally well .. its far far better performance due to passive and active noise cancellation… you can say that the ANC is at par with the Sony 1000x m3
The nuraphone‘s ANC takes advantage of special type of construction details, so in this case the noise cancellation happens through the ear cup speakers and the ear tip speakers captures your music‘s detail.
And the result is mind blowing music with quieter and crisp, clear detail listening at the same time.
Music Controls
Like most of the premium headphones, nuraphones possess built-in sensors which manages the power, auto switch ON when you put them on. So no POWER button needed.
So the only controls that you have are two touch points (one left and one right ear) .. these are located at the back of each ear cup.
The App can be customized to use these buttons as Music Start-Stop, Phone call Pick-Drop etc.
What is missing the most is the Volume Up-Down control… I think this is a must for any headphone, surely you can’t expect to have your smartphone near you while listening to the music!
So to lower or increase the music volume all you have to do is reach your phone! so annoying to me!!
Further utilization of touch buttons –
- Single and double tap allowing up to 4x custom functions.
- Double tap touch buttons, to perform more helpful functions without having to open your app or interrupt your listening.
Social ModeTM
This is one more simple function that let you hear your surroundings.
All you have to is to simply tap the nuraphone‘s touch buttons and without ever having to take your nuraphones off your head you will be able to hear what‘s going on around you.
I liked this simple intuitive feature, which is used frequently by me at home, specially to hear to my wife 🙂
Battery life
The company claims 20 hours of battery life with ANC ON, in actual listening test with approx 50% power ANC ON I could get around 26 hours of battery life which is pretty good. (although some users have given feedback of getting lower than 20 hours music time, but I am not sure what was the volume and type of music they played)
Charging –
One missing thing is Charging indicator – to show if the headphones are fully charged.
Since there is no light indicator, you don’t know when the battery is fully charged. So all that you can do is using the App.
Spoken Battery Level +
Audible Charging Signal indicates when your battery needs charging. Also the system generates audio signals to tell you battery levels and charging tones.
Surely this helps knowing when to charge the headphone, however visual simple LED indicator is a must, which is missing in nuraphones.
Which cables I can use with proprietary port on nuraphone headphones?
Thing which is different is that these headphones can charge themselves using your smartphones! maybe due to its proprietary port
The headphones are supplied with USB-A port, which means you can’t use lightening cable or standard micro USB cable of an android phone for charging these headphones, and you must carry this special USB-A cable with you.
You can buy following cables as per your need! but to me that is investment to the tune of $100 more!!
– Analog Cable – Custom 1.2m analog cable to connect your nuraphones via standard 3.5mm analog jack.
– Lightning cable – Custom 1.2m lightning cable to connect your nuraphones to an Apple device.
– USB-C cable – Custom 1.2m USB-C cable to connect your nuraphones to various Android phones.
– micro-USB cable – Custom 1.2m Micro-USB to connect your nuraphones to various Android phones.
– USB-A cable – Custom 1.2m USB-A cable to charge your nuraphones and play audio through your computer.
Bluetooth – wireless performance
– Range of Bluetooth around 50 feet before it starts loosing the signal, but starts cracking as soon as you hit any walls in between.
– You will be able to pair with more than one device at a time (Good point – Watch movie on iPod at the same time receive phone calls via iPhone)
– No latency watching Netflix and you tube videos from my Android phone
Bluetooth QuickSwitch
This is loke hot swapping the hard drives of computer!
So you will be able to hot swap Bluetooth connection from your smartphone to computer or Tabler without even disconnecting from your devices.
Setting up the App – Android version setup instructions
Step-by-Step guide
- First thing first, to create profile of your own (personal analysis as said in this post)
- So generate your own account in the App using your email, enter an email to get verification code using which you can activate your own personal profile.
- For each profile, you need a separate email ID, which is somewhat annoying, I think the App should permit generating multiple profiles using the single email ID.
- Anyway, you need to enter your name, email, age etc. Not sure what all this jugglery!!
- Okay once you setup your profile, now put the headphones over head, which will automatically power them ON.
- Now it will connect to the smartphone and generate your personal profile as described in mid section of this post (be sending signals etc)
- In about few minutes you will have your personal profile set-up which allows the “Immersion mode” which adjusts the bass in the headphones. Other than that, the app really doesn’t do much.
Offline Mode in App
Its nothing great, but only the app allows you to communicate for settings etc without connected to internet!
What it means is that it also stores your personal profile on local disk!! not sure what is so great to declare it as a feature!!
Packaging
Finally when you receive the package, you will be surprised to see the way they are packaged and delivered.
As per me its going overboard, anyway that is the way company thinks good.
The carrying case is also made from good material, having magnetic closure clicking while closing.
The overpack was made of recycled biodegradable paper foam.
Overall the packaging is also innovative and nicely done.
Bottom line
I loved the concept, the way the music is delivered is awesome and no one in world have ever done that, and not even thought over such out of box concept.
The way the deliver sound is simple astonishing, you must feel it at least once in life, even you are not going to buy it for whatever reason, one of which can be higher cost. Yes, it was costing around $400 when I got it in Jan 2019.