#nuraphone

I was really excited when I found out about Nuraphone headphones. Combining both over-ear (for bass/haptic feedback) and in-ear technologies, as well as customising the music to suit your particular hearing profile (something that the brilliant AKG N90Q did with great success), it was a combination that was too good to resist.

They arrived yesterday, and I was really eager to give them a spin!

Build quality is really very, very good. They feel solid, not cheap and plasticky, with nice soft over-ear pads that are made from a velvety plastic. The in-ear portion of the cans are nice and flexible and not intrusive at all. These don’t feel like IEMs in your ears, more like you’ve gently inserted a small finger :)

To customise the listening experience you have to use the Nura app, which couldn’t be simpler. Wear the headphones, pair them with your phone, be quiet, and listen to various bleeps and bloops for a few minutes while it calibrates to your ears.

After that’s done, you’re given a demo song that plays using the generic profile. The app tells you to swap to your calibrated profile when you’re ready. It is here that I noticed something not right...

You see, the generic profile sounded unbelievably crap. We’re not talking about cheap ear buds crap, but actually like it was intentionally fucked up with so much DSP: tinny highs, muddy lows, hardly any mids. It really was rubbish, and felt as if it was intentionally made that way, to make the customised profile sound even more amazing.

I was ready to switch to my calibrated profile, which I did and WOAH! What a difference. Everything sounded just right, and really quite good. Exciting!

I fiddled about with the “immersion” setting: what this does is change the degree of vibration on the over-ear parts, as well as how loud the bass is. The idea is that you can be “front row” with bone-ratting base, or turn it off completely, and anything in between.

Again, with the demo song, fiddling with this was quite unique, with true shaking bass at the most extreme setting, and smooth bass to accompany that, and none of that when it’s off. I settled for a setting in between.

Finally, the app told me to customise the buttons on the headphones. There’s one on each side and they’re (very) touch sensitive. By default, the left one toggles the immersion setting, while the right one plays/pauses. I left them as they are.

I switched over to my iPhone’s music app, and started listening to lots of different genres of music, and this is when it all fell apart :(

The main problem was that the Nuraphone was applying a huge amount of inconsistent DSP to the music, without any real consideration to what it was actually doing. In other words, if my calibrated hearing profile meant that the bass needed to be boosted and the treble lowered, it did that blindly, regardless of what that actually did to the listening experience.

To best highlight what I mean, I’ll list some example songs I listened to and what happened:

1\ Superman Theme - John Williams. The whole of this recording sounded like it was playing through a cheap bluetooth speaker, sat around 50 metres away from me. My assumption was that the mids were dampned down so much by the calibrated profile that the whole song was fucked.

2\ The Louvre - Lorde. This was a bit better. The bassy start sounded quite pleasant, but then Lorde sang, and when she went higher up on the scale her voice became sibilant and almost tinny. She drops down the scale and sounds like Lorde again. It was a really weird experience.

3\ I Want To Break Free - Queen. The best of the experiment, in that at least it was consistent throughout. However, still, Freddy’s voice sounded so artificially out of line with the rest of the song as we know it.

4\ Oxygene 17 - Jean-Michel Jarre. Again consistent throughout but it had the same problem as Superman, it sounded like it was playing through a cheap speaker.

5\ Human - Rag and Bone Man. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. When it starts and he sings, all low and that, it sounded really quite good. Then when he sings the chorus and goes up an octave or two, it immediately sounded all tinny and harsh. It was like someone had spliced two versions of the song, or like a different singer had come along to sing the chorus. A thoroughly unpleasant experience.

Another issue I noticed was with volume changes. The above songs were played via bluetooth on an iPhone 10. If I had the volume on 80% or so, some parts of the music were almost completely missing/low. If I went up to 100%, they suddenly appeared and were really quite loud. Drop the volume down and again they disappeared suddenly.

This issue, along with all the songs above, made me come to the conclusion I mentioned above: the DSP was changing everything with no consideration to what it was actually doing. It had decided that some frequencies had to be very low, and some very high, and so on. It was doing this regardless of context, so very-low-rag-and-bone-man was fine, higher-pitched-rag-and-bone-man was boosted beyond recognition. Very unpleasant.

To ensure this wasn’t an issue with bluetooth or MP3, I repeated the songs again but this time with a 3.5mm connection to my AK Jr, and FLAC sources. The exact some issues were replicated.

Sadly, by then I had come to the conclusion that these just aren’t for me. They way the same piece of music was changing as if a child was tweaking the DSP dials was just unpleasant, and I now have an RMA code to return them.

Finally, these headphones have gained great reviews on the interwebs, which does make me wonder whether the main issue is with my ears, or to be more precise with my hearing profile. I cannot see how professional reviewers can have the same listening experience that I had and still come back with a positive review. Or it could be that I was perhaps unfairly comparing them to my AKG N90Q and Sennheiser HD800S cans, both absolutely amazing at what they do. 

Saying that, however, Apple’s AirPods are a much more pleasant, and consistent, listening experience, so there’s also that.