Nura’s following up its unique and totally personalized Nuraphone over-ear headphones with an earbud version called the NuraLoop, and preorders just went live.
Deal Alert: For one week only, you can preorder at a 30% discount, bringing them down to $139. Nura’s Nuraphone hardly ever goes on sale, and we suspect that will be the case with the NuraLoop as well.
Like the Nuraphone, the NuraLoop will create a unique sonic profile just for your ears, automatically, and tailor all of your music to sound perfect just for you. Here’s how it works, according to Whitson Gordon:
The Nuraphone isn’t the only headphone to alter its output for your ears—Beyerdynamic’s Aventhoo Wireless and the Kickstarted B&B Pure come to mind—but those other headphones perform their listening test differently. They’ll play tones, one by one, and ask you to press a button whenever you begin to hear each tone. Nuraphone, on the other hand, automates the entire process, playing a sweeping set of tones over the course of a couple minutes, using microphones inside the ear tips to detect the small vibrations coming back from your eardrum. From that, it can determine which frequencies you’re more or less sensitive to, and adjust its sound accordingly...
The result is a remarkably well-balanced frequency response: after setting up my listening profile, highs were clear without being too sibilant or tinny, and the mids were just the right amount of forward (I could have done with a bit more clarity in the midrange, but that’s a personal preference most people don’t share). Bass was a different story: it was customizable thanks to the Nuraphone’s “Immersion Mode” slider, which lets you boost or reduce bass to your tastes.
Beyond the custom tuning though, pretty much every feature you could possibly want in a set of wireless earbuds is here, and they seem like a steal for $139. They run for up to 16 hours on a charge, include active noise cancelation, use Bluetooth 5 for a stable connection, and can even be used wired if you’re on a plane or run out of battery.
The one obvious caveat here is that the NuraLoops aren’t truly wireless like AirPods; they still have a wire that will run behind your head (though this does allow for that aforementioned wired connection). That feels a little dated in 2019, but with this feature set, we think a lot of people will be able to forgive it.