These headphones give you a quick hearing test and enable you to experience a sound that's adjusted for your own hearing.
We've seen some similar headphones that adjust to your hearing - the Even H1 - but they test your hearing by relying on your reaction to what you're hearing. Instead, the £349 Nuraphones automatically assess your hearing by monitoring otoacoustic emissions. Nura - the company behind Nuraphones - say that differences in human hearing between people can be as different as 20dB, up to seven volume clicks on a smartphone.
The Nuraphone learning process is performed using a companion app available for iOS and Android. This guides you through the process as you can see here.
Having tried them out, we can definitely say they do make a difference with the hearing profile turned on and off. We also tried them with someone else's hearing profile and the audio sounded quite flat even though it didn't to the other person.
Interestingly, the Nuraphones describe themselves as neither in-ear- nor over-ear. Instead they sit over your ears but each soft earcup has a hard protruding part that extends into your earhole.
As you'd expect from a £349 pair of headphones, the materials used are of good quality, with a stainless steel band, comfortable silicon and vented earcups. Battery life is around 20 hours.
The Nuraphones are Qualcomm aptX Bluetooth and cleverly automatically turn on and off depending on whether they're on your head. However, there are cables to connect your Nuraphones directly to your device, whether that's a USB-C or Lightning connector, an analogue cable or Micro USB.
If we have any minor criticisms of our early days with the Nuraphones, it's that they don't feel particularly light on the head (they are comfortable, however) and the companion app has to tell you which way round the headphones should be - surely this should be made obvious with a nice big 'L' and 'R' on the headphones themselves.
Also of note is that the box within the outer box is made from potato starch. There's then a carry case within this which you can store your headphones in.
The Nuraphones are available for £349 from today.
