We're big fans of Nura's hearing-adaptive headphone technology, which assesses your hearing and develops an EQ curve just for your ears. They remain to this date the best headphones we've heard. Now, Nura has packaged the tech into a set of adaptive Bluetooth earphones called the NuraLoop.
The NuraLoop is a compact set of earphones joined together with a wire that comes over your ears. The earphones contain the same kind of tiny microphones that allow the Nura headphones to perform an otoacoustic hearing test on you when you first pop them on, firing a selection of strange bleeping sounds into your ear and listening for what the cochlea sends back out through the eardrum to measure exactly what's being perceived by your brain.
This lets Nura's software build a unique hearing profile for each listener that compensates for each person's hearing deficiencies and oversensitivities to give you a personalized sound. In our experience with the in/over ear headphones, the results are spectacular.
It'll be interesting to see how Nura manages bass with these earphones, though, because the headphones use an ingenious technique of delivering bass presence through skin conduction via the earcups, where they deliver spine-chilling low-end immersion and feel without cluttering up the EQ profile with too much low end. When we sampled fellow Australian company Audeara's adaptive headphones, which didn't run such a skin conduction system, we found they either lacked low end, or suffered from a muddier sound when we adjusted them to compensate. So we're looking forward to hearing how Nura has navigated this problem in the earbuds.
The NuraLoop will feature built-in active noise cancelling, touch-activated social mode so you can hear a conversation without having to pop a plug out, tap, double-tap and touch dial controls, water resistance, and "extended battery life."
They'll connect to devices through Bluetooth 5, but also carry a detachable magnetic cable if you want to use them analog-style on a plane, or some other ancient device that runs a 3.5mm jack. NuraLoop will go on sale sometime later this year.
Source: Nura
