Nuraphone Review

With 3.5mm jack now disappearing from most smartphones this year and Bluetooth streaming now the only option to choose from, the headphone market has evolved from being just an accessory to a full-fledged wireless device with features rivalling those of some music players as well. The device we are going to review today, however, is about to take the overall meaning of headphones to the next level a territory that was owned by the so-called headphone flagship brands is now being a disrupt in the way we listen to music and perfectly so customized to your ears Say hello, to the Nuraphone. A product that started out as a Kickstarter campaign in 2016, has now become a mainstream product, and they want to customise the way every individual customer consumes their media. The science is brilliant yet very simple. The basic premise for this is the fact that all of us hear different parts of the audio spectrum differently and that in turn affects how we individually consume the same media. For example, a person who is not bass sensitive may find it hard to enjoy the bass tuned headphones from Beats by Dr.Dre, compared to someone who is super sensitive to bass.

The Nuraphone seeks to level the playing field by calibrating itself to each individual customer’s ears and then providing them with the most optimised hearing experience. Nuraphone learns about your hearing in under a minute by playing a range of tones into your ears and measures the faint sound the ear generates called the Otoacoustic Emission (OAE) that’s 10,000 times faint than the sound that went in to calibrate and is the same underlying technology that’s used for newborns to  examine hearing in babies. Based on the feedback generated from Otoacoustic Emission (OAE) the nuraphone generates a unique hearing profile based on your sensitivity to high and low frequency in a colourful spectrum that is unique to you. To ensure that this is not a gimmicky feature we tried creating

On the design front, the Nuraphone is a sleek yet oddly strange pair of over the ear headphones with built-in earbuds, which may sound odd at first, but once you see their application, everything will make sense.

Once you get the Nuraphones, the first thing you are going to do is calibrate it to your ears and that’s where the in built ear buds come into play. The process requires us to squeeze the earbuds deep into the ear canal and we are then exposed to sounds ranging across the audio frequency spectrum. The faint echoes of these vibrations are picked up by the Nuraphone thanks to a supersensitive microphone built into it. This is the same microphone that NASA is allegedly using for their 2020 Mars Mission, so simply put, they really are super super sensitive.

Why then, didn’t Nura just release the earbuds. Well, thereason is simple, the tests it performs to graph our sound profile, requiresextreme levels of noise cancellation on the outside because any stray noise canbe picked up and mess up the tests. Hence, the outer over ear headphones.Coming back to the calibration, once the tests are done, the companion app by Nuramakes your unique sound profile and graphs it for your reference. What happensnext is the real beauty. Every time you now stream music through theNuraphones, the headphone automatically calibrate every song to your uniquesound profile and the results are absolutely astounding!!

The real question however, is whether or not Nuraphone isthe best version of your music, well for now, its taken for granted since thereis no real competition for the device in the market, the results speak volumesabout how amazing the Nuraphone really is. While the device itself is refinedand beautifully conceived, the companion app with new updates features likesocial mode where you get to hear the music and also strike a conversation withyour friends is really a standout feature the social mode doesn’t make enhancesthe sound from your surrounding its like having a boost to you hearing capacitywhere it picks up all the faint sound but never a distraction from the musicyou are listening . I call the social mode baby mode where I listen to musicand also keep an ear on when the baby wakes up and starts crying.NUraphone has also got the FrontRow immersion mode right from the app which causes the outer diaphragm of the headphone to deliver pulsating bass right down to your cheeks replicating the ideal scenario of a live concert where the bass is what you feel through your skin maintaining the clear details of the sound

At the moment, we can only store three sound profiles, and while every new test yields a slightly different sound profile for you, the overall graph remains more or less unchanged, giving you a consistent output.

Overall, the Nuraphone is something that is continuously improving and Nura has promised that over time, the device will learn to constantly test the ears on its own, and automatically adjust the settings accordingly.

For now, we would conclude that the Nuraphone is a product ready for use no gimmicks, crystal clear sound customized to your ears. The only drawback is I would have preferred a 3.5mm jack or a USB Audio cable support as well for the headphone.