The Nothing Sound
Contents
What matters, of course, is: how does the Nothing Headphone 1 sound? This is a double-whammy. By default, without EQ on, it’s frankly not very good. The midrange is somewhat prominent and the bass is muddy and detailless; really like one big buzz. Even after burn-in, this remains.
However, if we fiddle a bit with the equalizer and finally apply a profile from Linus Tech Tips who made a profile based on measurements, the Nothing Headphone 1 clears up tremendously. The low end in particular is much better with the adjusted equalizer. The midrange also becomes a lot calmer, but after longer listening it was too muted for us; perhaps our Headphone 1 has a slightly different response in that area. We ended up adding a little more midrange.
All in all, the Nothing Headphone 1 can bring a lot of listening pleasure, provided you take a little time to adjust the equalizer to your taste. You can actually forget about the standard profiles; they are downright bad (our opinion). But the custom equalizer is very good and with the help of q-factors very accurate to tune, hats off to this feature.
Overall
Once we get the equalizer right, the Nothing Headphone 1 is honestly a very fine pair of headphones! The physical buttons, decent reproduction with enough detail and control in the soundstage, the comfort: it all adds up to the 300 Euro price.
The noise cancellation is also good. Your author is not really a fan of ANC, especially when the cushions already keep out enough noise, but in noisy environments it is a nice option. What’s nice is that the degree of noise cancelling is also adjustable. It’s even adaptive if you turn that on. In the highest setting, the pressure on the ears for your author is not pleasant. In low setting it is still there too, but a little less.
What we find a little crazy is that “ANC off” is not selectable via the physical button (“roll button” held down). That would be a nice option to add, though.
Transparent mode is nice in itself; especially on the street when you do want to hear things from your surroundings. We used that one more than we thought we would. In fact, it takes away one (for your author) disadvantage of closed headphones; being completely disconnected from the environment.