Nothing Headphone (1) - Three month review

After researching and planning to replace my aging Bose QC35’s with a pair of headphones from the Sony XM line, I went and got myself the Nothing Headphone (1). This was entirely avoidable. A few weeks earlier I was in the Nothing flagship store in London buying my partner a birthday present. She was browsing wrap-around earphones and open-ears. I was loitering about, touching things I had no business touching. We tried the headphones. She liked them. I bought them. So much for wrap-around earphones.

This all felt depressingly familiar. Like the time I stood there weighing up a perfectly sensible Samsung Galaxy against the Nothing Phone (2), both roughly the same price, knowing full well which one was the “correct” choice and still getting the other one. Once again, I was staring at a fork in the road.

On one side: the Sony XM4. Universally praised. Objectively good. Held together with “cheap plastic hinges that break all the time.”

On the other: The Nothing Headphone (1). The headphones everyone online insists “sound shit.”

Tough call.

Inside the usual Nothing-brand minimalist packaging was the largest headphone case I have ever seen. The Nothing Headphone (1) does not fold down like a normal, well-adjusted pair of headphones. This is, in theory, a good thing because fewer hinges means fewer places to snap. In reality, it means the case is roughly the size and shape of a medieval shield.

My old Bose QC35s would scrunch themselves obediently into a neat little case, disappear into my bag, and never cause a problem. This thing however, demands careful planning. Given the amount of random nonsense I carry around in my backpack when travelling, I’d have to actually pay attention to the order of things being put in to make it all fit, as if I’m the guy in the rafters dropping the Tetris pieces down.

Opening the case, though, instantly softened the blow. In my completely unbiased and objectively correct opinion, these are the best-looking headphones on the market right now. I am no longer strapping two giant plastic cereal bowls to the sides of my head. Instead, I’m wearing what looks like retro-futuristic industrial art. Something a set designer would put on an extra in a film about a future that never quite happened.

I pulled the headphones out of their pizza-box-sized home and clamped them onto my head. And when I say clamped, I mean it. These things felt like I’d willingly placed my head into a vice. Still, I showed no weakness and downloaded the companion app, hooking them up to my phone.

Coming from the Bose QC35s, I physically winced at the memory of pairing those things with anything new. New phone? Pain. Nintendo Switch? Pain. “Can’t connect.” “No devices found.” The Bose app crashing. It was, and still is, an utter shambles.

The Nothing Headphone (1), on the other hand, connected to my phone in roughly one picosecond and has behaved impeccably ever since. They’re currently paired to two laptops, a phone, and two Nintendo Switches, and somehow they always know which one I want. They automatically jump to the last-used device in range, drop it cleanly when another connects, and always keep a background connection to my phone like a loyal little digital butler.

Very futuristic. Maybe all headphones do this now. I have no idea.

But before anything, I had to hear the “Sound By KEF”, which is proudly displayed in the Nothing dot-matrix font on the left ear. KEF are a British audio company specialising in speakers that none of us can afford, so to hear that they’ve teamed up with Nothing to supply the sound units in mass-produced headphones was certainly a talking point online (not for me though, I have better shit to do). My only experience with KEF products is me and my sister pushing in the tweeters so they looked like a stomped crisp packets when we were children on a pair of KEF cabinets my dad has. They sounded pretty crap after that, lemmie tell you.

I loaded up a few tracks and bounced around my usual rotation to see what these KEF-powered headphones sounded like with absolutely no EQ meddling from me. And yes, I immediately understood why so many people online say the Nothing Headphone (1) sounds like shit. They’re pretty darn flat. Flat in the way that makes people panic if they’re used to headphones doing everything for them. There’s no bloated bass, no top-end dialled lifted right up. It’s just flat sound, sitting there not trying.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life in recording studios using reference headphones, and these landed very close to that territory. Not quite as honest, but near enough that I started picking out little details in songs I’ve heard to death.

Still, I wanted to EQ them to my liking. So I opened the app and was immediately met with the most aggressively competent headphone app I’ve ever used. My previous experience tops out at Samsung’s Buds app and the Bose app, which doesn’t exactly put me in a position to crown this the best audio companion app ever made. Still, opening it felt like stepping into a control panel from the future.

I went straight for the EQ and was pleasantly surprised to find a proper 8-band parametric setup waiting for me. Not the usual toddler-proof sliders you get on most consumer audio gear, but something that actually lets you grab frequencies and create a total mess. I was very happy.

The app also lets you browse and download other people’s EQ profiles, from random people to big-time audio YouTubers I don’t watch. I worked through the top-rated ones out of curiosity and disliked every single one of them for entirely different reasons.

So I wiped the slate clean, zeroed everything out, and tuned them to my preference. I’ve put a QR code below so you can load the same settings because I'm caring like that.

The app also includes a sound and hearing test that promises to tailor everything specifically to your very own ears. I went into it assuming mine were moderately fried from my time in music, but apparently they’re doing fine so I was pretty stoked about that. Flicking the Personal Sound setting on and off during a track, I can just about tell the difference. The top end reins itself in a little and the low end gets a little nudge up. Nothing dramatic, but enough to justify its existence. My partner, however, had a very different experience. Once her test finished and she hit play with Personal Sound enabled, she acted like she was visited by God. Up until that point, and with all other headphones and earphones she’d had, she’d barely been hearing much out of her right ear at all. Her Headphone (1)’s shifted the volumes and frequencies about to give her a fully complete soundstage. The graphs told the whole story. Mine (below) looked calm and restrained, like a sleepy horizon line. Hers looked like a flamboyant autograph.

During the setup phase I kept bouncing back to my Bose QC35s, mostly because they were comfier and, at least initially, sounded better. But once I’d finished EQ’ing and switched on the Personal Sound profile, that relationship ended abruptly. The 40mm KEF drivers in these things pluck out those twinkly high frequencies, hone in on the mids, and blast out the lows without any muddiness, clipping or compression artefacts.

Thankfully, Nothing have gone against the grain and fitted these with actual physical controls instead of the touch-capacitive nonsense everyone else seems obsessed with. A proper roller handles volume, clicks in for play and pause, and a click-and-hold toggles ANC. Just below that is a paddle for next and previous, answering and rejecting calls, plus a hold for fast forward or rewind. Then there’s a single button on the side that you can map to whatever you like. I’ve set mine to toggle ANC on and off with a single press because it’s far quicker than clicking and holding the roller. The long press opens ChatGPT voice, which I mostly use so I can pretend I’m on an important call whenever someone approaches me looking like they might ask a question.

The ANC is good. Great compared to my previous headphones. Transparency mode is also excellent. Clear enough that it feels like you’re not wearing anything at all, except better because your ears stay warm. The fit and clamp alone block out a surprising amount of noise, so once ANC is switched on it cuts through most of the background nonsense you’re forced to endure while existing. Planes. Traffic. Construction. Air con units. People asking for help. All mostly gone.

These headphones insist on playing a little sound effect whenever ANC is toggled. When turning it on, you’re treated to a sort of reverse 808 clap that rolls into a bassy kick drum. Fine. I can live with that. However, sometimes while that jingle is playing, it seems to mess with whatever music is underneath it, dragging in a sudden surge of bass from nowhere until it finishes, after which everything carries on like nothing happened.

Turning ANC off, however, triggers a recording of someone exhaling like they’ve just completed a guided meditation. It was novel the first time. Now it’s just irritating. Especially considering every other system sound is made up of digital bleeps and bloops. The breathing feels wildly out of place, like someone at the last minute insisted on adding “human warmth” to a pair of headphones that look like something the Terminator dropped after blasting its fleshy targets into fragments.

Speaking of sound effects, the sound these headphones release to let you know they’ve connected to a source is like how I imagine a thundering lightning bolt would sound if it were made of Lego. A violent, digital, and blocky electric sound. The volume is fixed, which means if you’re listening to Bach late at night on the southern veranda and wander into the drawing room where your laptop sits atop the grand piano, the headphones will quietly auto-connect in the background via dual connection, then immediately announce it by frying your mind with that insane sound. Every morning I put these on, power them up, and get jolted into a state of huge unrest, primed and ready for the day. It’s become so aggressively jarring that I now hold the headphones out at arm’s length before turning them on, just to preserve a shred of sanity before it’s drained away in work meetings.

Another small but deeply irritating detail is the little connection status light by the power switch. At night, when I’m wearing these in bed or slouched on the sofa pretending I’ll sleep soon, that light casts its miserable white glow directly onto my right shoulder. It sounds petty. It is petty. But you will notice it, and once you do, it’ll slowly sand your brain down to a curve. I’m seriously considering sticking a bit of black tape over it because I don’t care what that light is trying to communicate. It’s either connected, connecting, or low on power, and I already have an app and a widget telling me all of that without shining a tiny lighthouse at me in the dark.

Other than those small annoyances, these things are excellent. Built from a mix of metal, plastic, and sharp, design-led lines, they actually feel like a premium product whilst being priced just below one. They look like a pack of cards split in two by a headband, but dragged a few decades into the future, which, as with all Nothing products, is gonna be divisive.

The battery feels endless. The initially jarring sound can be shaped exactly to your liking, without being locked into some brand’s idea of what you should enjoy.

I’m mighty impressed.