AirPods Pro 2 upstaged? Nura's new true wireless earbuds for Android look elite

(Image credit: Nura)

published 30 June 2022

Nura make some of the best true wireless earbuds you can buy, and while their NuraTrue wireless earbuds don't top our buying guide they come highly recommended; our sister site Techradar reckons they're the best customisable wireless headphones on the market. And now there's a new version for audiophiles. If they sound as good as they look, Apple's forthcoming AirPods Pro 2 have serious competition.

Nura isn't pulling its punches: it says that the new lossless Bluetooth streaming of its NuraTrue Pro earbuds "is about to make 95% of the world's wireless headphones and earbuds obsolete." Instead of compressing music, Qualcomm's aptX Lossless delivers full uncompressed CD quality for a serious audio upgrade and these buds are designed to make the most of it. That makes them awfully tempting – and that's before you see the rest of the spec.

Pro audio sound without the pro audio price

In addition to aptX Lossless, the NuraTrue Pro earbuds have spatial audio (including upsampling from stereo) and improved noise cancellation. They include Nura's clever sound personalisation tech and ProEQ controls, and the noise cancelling now reacts instantly to changes in head positioning to deliver more effective muting of unwanted sounds. Interestingly there's a bone conduction sensor that feels your voice rumbling through your skull and uses it to deliver clearer speech in calls.

Last but not least, there's 8 hours of battery life and another 24 from the charging case, which is a lot more than the AirPods Pro currently offer.

I'm intrigued by these earbuds, and if you have the right kit – aptX Lossless requires the Snapdragon Sound Platform, which is coming to the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 – I'm sure they'll sound fantastic. I think Apple's AirPods 2 are likely to be the better buds for Apple users, not least because the iPhone doesn't support the aptX codecs, but for compatible Android phones Nura could be onto a winner.

The NuraTrue Pro will retail for $329 USD, £299 GBP, €359 EUR and $499 AUD, but early bird discounts on Kickstarter can bring the price as low as $199. That's not much money for what appear to be some seriously impressive true wireless earbuds.

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).