I Wanted to Love the Nothing Headphone (1) Pro

The goofy case is not my real problem here. My issue is that this headphone gets a bunch of important fundamentals right, then kneecaps itself with an acoustic concept that makes no sense for an actively tuned wireless ANC product.

There is a version of this headphone I could have recommended without much hesitation. Hypothetically, a different headphone with the same comfort, ANC and transparency, physical buttons, and most importantly the parametric EQ, would be a decent offering. 

But what I can’t get past here is that the sound problems this has do not feel like a simple tuning misstep. Instead it feels like an eminently avoidable design flub, because Nothing added unnecessary acoustic complexity without delivering a meaningful upside, all to maximize the marketing story.

Parametric EQ

The clearest win here is the inclusion of parametric EQ. I’ve asked for this feature so many times that I’m not about to pretend it stops mattering just because I do not like the stock tuning. More companies should be doing this, full stop.

That said, EQ is only as useful as the headphone’s actual behavior allows. If a product is badly tuned but behaves predictably, parametric EQ can save it. The frustrating part here is that this headphone gives you the right tool, then enthusiastically faceplants into the kind of acoustic variability that keeps that tool from being as effective as it should be.

Acoustic design

The core mistake, in my view, is the triple-driver concept. This headphone uses two dynamic drivers and one MEMS driver, and I think that’s exactly the sort of thing that should make you cautious with wireless ANC headphones, because most of them that use multiple drivers so far don't sound very good. 

For passively tuned products, I at least understand why companies lean on driver narratives. In passively tuned products, the drivers and their integration to serve as a meaningful limitation on what can be achieved sonically. Here, though, we’re talking about an active platform that can be digitally tuned, which means that limitation simply does not exist.

If other actively tuned single-driver ANC headphones can achieve better sound quality than Headphone (1) Pro, and for the most part, they do, without this extra complexity, then what is the complexity actually affording you? As it seems, not much. 

Worse, I think this unnecessary decision introduces more variability & narrow-band resonance problems than it would have without adding all these drivers.

Sound quality

The bass boost is intense, making fundamental tones sound swollen and a little sluggish overall. That by itself would be a tuning choice I could dislike, but still understand & live with. 

The real problem for me is a treble spike around 5 kHz, which makes snare drums and cymbals sound harsh, compressed, and honestly pretty awful when it lands the wrong way.

And yes, ordinarily Parametric EQ is exactly what would serve as the solution, letting us fix the subpar stock tuning.

Good on Nothing for including it, absolutely. But unfortunately for me, the channel matching on my head is subpar, so that same spike cannot be reliably notched out in a way I’d trust across units or even across heads.

That is the annoying part, because the headphone’s response can shift a lot with placement, and a multi-source design like this makes that variability even more of a headache.

Consistency

Headphones behave differently on different heads, and this one seems especially sensitive to that reality. When I try to match placement on test equipment, the spread of results is wide enough to make me skeptical of any simple fix, because the problem might move around or show up differently for another listener. So even though the wideband tuning may be in the ballpark of what people like for bass to treble, this headphone is a bit of a resonance machine, making it hard to predict exactly where various resonances will show up for people and hard to recommend an EQ profile to fix those issues.

Competition from Apple and Bose does a better job at headphone behavior consistency across different heads because they have microphones facing inwards to compensate for position and anatomy variation that impacts sound. Even if they can't perfectly linearize the treble, they're at least identifying these problems and solving them, while the Nothing Headphone (1) Pro does literally nothing in that regard.

Comparisons

Against the Apple AirPods Max 2, I still think the Apple headphone sounds better overall, even though I do not like its treble either. The bass quality is better, and the response stays more consistent up through the lower mids, which matters more than people want to admit.

The Bose QC Ultra Gen 2 is, to my ears, the more sophisticated device. It does not give me the same parametric EQ flexibility, but it does give me CustomTune, which does a decent job of making the mid to treble transition more palatable and keeps the response mostly consistent up to around 4khz. To me it just sounds far better overall once I've dialed in the bass and treble, and I don't need to worry about the rest. While with the Nothing Headphone (1) Pro I'd need to spend hours notching out resonances on my head.

The Sennheiser HDB 630 is the other obvious comparison, and it is the more convincing answer by default. It already sounds significantly better without needing me to fight the response as hard. Even Sennheiser’s Momentum 5, which has its own issues, ends up with a much better treble presentation, and I’d rather deal with its bass excess than this harsh, strident top end.

As for the Sony WH-1000XM6, the story is different but still not flattering for Sony. The XM6 has treble problems of its own and no parametric EQ, so I could see this Nothing model being more fixable in a best-case scenario. But that is still a best-case scenario, and I would not buy on that hope alone.

Verdict

I like the ergonomics, the buttons, the design language, the ANC, and the transparency mode. I really do. 

But the sound quality shortcomings, the channel-matching problems, and the head-to-head variability mean this is not something I could ever recommend, and I think the triple-driver concept is an outright bad answer to a problem that active wireless headphones do not need to create for themselves. 

If you are tempted by driver stories, I’d urge you to look past them and pay attention to measured performance on rigs and on real heads, because that is where the real truth is here, not in the marketing.