Noble FoKus Artemis - I'm not surprised

The Noble FoKus Artemis is yet another multi-driver wireless noise cancelling headphone, this time with three drivers, a dynamic driver, balanced armature, and planar. I’m not especially impressed by that story on its own, because after spending time with it, I think the skepticism is more than justified. 

This is one of the easiest premium ANC headphones I can outright reject. The hardware is appealing enough to make the disappointment worse, but the sound is so catastrophically bad, and impossible to fix, that it truly does overwhelm everything else about the product.

I want to be very clear about the hierarchy here, because this is really the whole review: I like a lot about the physical product, but I do not recommend buying it. In fact, I’d buy just about anything else instead.

Design and comfort

This is the part I actually liked, and I liked it quite a bit. In my view, the form factor, comfort, and aesthetics are genuinely excellent for this category. The exterior has a suede-like cloth finish that feels nice and a little more luxurious than the usual anonymous plastic-and-pleather formula, and the headphone itself feels sufficiently light on the head.

The ear openings are not huge, but they worked well for me. I was able to fit my ears inside the cups without them getting pushed awkwardly against the baffle, which is a common problem on plenty of wireless over-ears. The pads are replaceable, the battery is replaceable, and it carries an IP52 rating. These are good decisions, and I wish more wireless headphones copied them.

Noise cancelling

The noise cancelling is fine. It works, but is mostly focused on lower frequencies, and the high-frequency information still comes through pretty clearly. That did make it feel less competitive than the best alternatives, especially if you are an ordinary consumer who's tried the competition and are expecting a premium ANC headphone to do more than just shave off the rumble.

So yes, it suppresses some of the stuff you want suppressed, but no, it is not a class leader.

Sound quality

This is where the Artemis completely loses me. 

Subjectively, the bass is bloated and overbearing, with individual notes losing definition and a lot of musical information getting buried underneath it. 

That would already be a problem, but the more I tried to reduce the bass in the app, the more the midrange revealed itself as an incoherent, wibbly-wobbly mess that did not sound natural or refined. Vocals and instruments came across as unnaturally stitched together, with constant imbalances between fundamental and harmonic resonances. 

And then the treble... oof. There is a massive low-treble dip followed by a ridiculous peak, then this sharp, piercing upper treble that turns cymbals and sibilants into a small personal attack. It is harsh, sibilant, incoherent, compressed sounding, and borderline unlistenable.

App and EQ

The app gives you a few EQ options, and at first I was willing to be hopeful about that. It is better than the dumbest fixed-band presets, sure, but it is not actually proper parametric EQ. That distinction matters a lot here, because the controls are not specific enough to solve this headphone's sonic problems.

I could not notch out the treble peak I'm getting around 7 kHz with enough precision, and I could not fix the upy-downy, wibbly-wobbly mids either. I could adjust the bass somewhat, but that only gets you so far when the main problems are structural and spread throughout the entirety of the response. 

In my view, this headphone would need many bands of full parametric EQ to be redeemable in any meaningful sense, and it simply does not have that.

Multi-driver marketing

This is the part that really grates on me, because the multi-driver story does not tell you anything useful about sound quality on its own. 

More drivers, or certain driver types, tells you next to nothing about whether the end result is actually any good. It is, and has always been, about what you do with the ingredients, not the ingredients themselves. What they did here... was bad. I would rather see a single-driver headphone with proper parametric EQ than this kind of overcomplicated setup that still sounds terrible anyway. 

As it stands, even the ordinary consumer ANC headphones from Apple, Bose, Sony, and even the Nothing Headphone 1 Pro sounded better to me for sound quality. So yes, I am strongly cautioning you against buying the Artemis. There are better options, and in this case that is not faint praise, it is the whole verdict.

Bottom line

I found the Artemis to be among the worst sounding headphones I’ve ever heard, and very likely the worst sounding ANC headphone that people would consider a legitimate contender in this class. 

That is not me being precious or picky about frequency response for sport either, because this is a tuning that is so imbalanced and so fatiguing that it actively makes listening unpleasant. I was not listening to this thing thinking about minute preference deviations or small things I'd change. I was just trying to get through music without wincing. Not a great sign.

This headphone is frustrating enough to call "bad" rather than merely mediocre, because so much else about this headphone is good enough that a competent tuning, or at least proper corrective EQ tools, could have changed the conversation completely. 

Instead, the part that matters most falls apart, and it falls apart hard.