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By not having products, the Cayman Islands registered The company was able to assemble a device with off-the-shelf components (the first-generation Ear 1 didn’t even have custom drivers) quickly and sell it, taking advantage of the connections the co-founders had made while they were at OnePlusanother brand with a similar strategy.
Nothing’s initial product had a good mix of hardware and software, and the headphones sounded pretty solid compared to others. We liked them in the review, although not enough to make them one of our top picks.
The second generation of headphones, the Ear (Stick) (7/10, Wired Review) and Ear (2) (8/10, Wired Review) brought custom drivers and a better case, although they still look, feel, and sound very similar to the vast majority of headphones I call “AirPods but.” You probably get the idea: Airpods but with color. AirPods but with better pads. airpods but with lossless LDAC audio either Noise Cancellation. Almost every brand has them, almost all of them are pretty decent. LG doesn’t even make cell phones anymore, and yet has a couple of AirPod clones. The fruit hangs from the ground.
The new Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear (a) appear to once again offer incremental performance increases. I say it seems that because even though the company asked WIRED to announce these new products to the world, it has yet to provide us with usable images, battery life, release date or pricing, despite repeated inquiries. All the brand provided was the image you see at the top of this article.
Nada gave us a bit of information about the inside of the headphones, which we have to assume will look like the older models until proven otherwise. The brand claims that a new ceramic driver will produce crisper, clearer sound in the treble, and a new internal architecture will deliver deeper bass. It also touts new adaptive noise cancellation technology in Nothing Ear (a) that is now 5 dB quieter overall (from 40 dB to 45 dB reduction across generations). It’s okay, but not surprising.
I’m not sure if these incremental innovations are enough to put the brand in the top tier of consumer audio, but at least they keep it from falling behind. Apple itself has gradually updated the AirPods and AirPods Pro for generations, but it also has the best-selling product in the world.
There is no solid state for nothing
It’s not that Nada doesn’t have the ability to develop new things. When he launched his first headphones, he had a combined staff of 30 people in audio. According to Evangelidis, that staff now numbers 300 people, including five dedicated acoustics engineers and a team of 30 people solely responsible for debugging the new active noise cancellation. That’s significantly more brainpower, which is exactly the kind of thing that could lead to notable innovation, whether in these new models or in the future.
Once again: I haven’t heard or seen a pair yet and have no idea how much they’ll cost. They will be released later this year and samples will reach reviewers in no time. On paper, and without the vital pricing information (but knowing that Nothing headphones have historically cost between $100 and $150), it looks like they will be competitive headphones that will likely offer many of the same features as options from JLab, Jabra, Oneplus. , Samsung and many others.
