Nura Nuraphone Wireless Headphones Review

The Nura Nuraphone are stylish headphones once on your head. They look like premium headphones with a metal finish and a sleek overall design. However, you do have visible wires coming out of the cups. Some people may also find their design a bit unconventional when they're not on your ears since they have the protruding in-ear tips inside the cups. They only come in an all-black color scheme.

The Nura Nuraphone are decently comfortable headphones, but their fit feels a bit odd if you’re not used to it. The cups and headband are well-padded and comfortable, but some may feel that the in-ear fit mixed with the over-ear cups is weird. On the upside, the tips don’t enter too deep inside your ear canal. These headphones usually come with three additional tip sizes. However, our unit didn't come with them, so we had to contact Nura Customer Support to get them. There are also a lot of online reports of customers having to do the same as they seem to be often out of stock. The headphones come with the biggest tip size.

The Nura Nuraphone have two touch-sensitive surfaces where the logos are on the cups. You can touch each logo to activate different controls which you need to set in the app. When connecting the headphones to the app, it doesn’t have any commands set up at first. You have many options, like play/pause music and answer/hang-up calls, enable/disable immersion, enable/disable social mode, track skipping, and volume controls. You have single-tap and double-tap commands on each ear cup, making for a total of four different possible actions. Unfortunately, this means you can’t use all these options once, and you’ll have to choose which ones are the most useful for you.

Due to their over-ear design, they trap a fair amount of heat inside their ear cups. This makes a noticeable difference in temperature that you could notice, especially if you want to use them for sports. You are more than likely going to sweat more if you work out with them. However, note that our breathability rig may not completely represent how hot these headphones get due to their hybrid over/in-ear design.

The Nura Nuraphone aren’t very portable. Their over-ear design is bulky, and you can't fold them into a more compact format. The cups don’t swivel to lay flat. They might be a bit hard to put inside your bag, but on the upside, they do come with a case. If you want something much more portable, check out the Nura NuraLoop Wireless, wireless in-ears that still feature Nura's personalized custom EQ.

The Nura Nuraphone case is excellent. It's sturdy and protects the headphones well against fall damage, scratches, and light water exposure. The case’s lid is shut by a magnetic strap that doesn’t open easily, which is nice. However, the size of the case is pretty big and takes noticeably more space than the Nuraphone by themselves.

The Nura Nuraphone are very well-built headphones. Their headband is made from a full metal frame, which is flexible and sturdy. The cups and headband paddings are made from silicone. The cups feel dense enough to survive a few falls too. On the other hand, part of the cables linking the cups is apparent and could be the weak link of the build. Also, the cups don’t have a good range of motion, meaning that a lot of physical stress on the headphones could break them.

The Nura Nuraphone are stable enough for casual listening sessions but might not be the best option for sports activities. They're decently tight on the head, but their overall fit is loose enough that head movement will make the headphones fall from your head.

• Nura Nuraphone headphones
• USB charging cable
• Cable case
• Traveling case

The Nura Nuraphone's frequency response consistency is quite good, thanks to their in-ear tips. There’s some variation in the bass range since these frequencies are reproduced by the over-ear part of the headphones. Some people in the office found them to be bass-heavy, while others disagreed. We couldn’t measure this accurately as we couldn't use human measurements for the bass range due to the in-ear tips. Overall, you shouldn’t have a problem getting consistent audio reproduction with the Nuraphone for your personal use but might experience a different sound than others.

We feel that the Nura Nuraphone's bass performance is very good. The bass is being produced by the over-ear part of the headphones and adds a good amount of thump and rumble to the sound. They feel a bit more bass-heavy than what the graph shows, especially in low-bass. You can also adjust the “immersion mode” to mimic being closer to stage speakers, which results in more vibration in the bass. The mismatch shown in the graph isn’t audible and is more than likely a flaw in our testing.

Some people in the office felt that they weren't as bass-heavy as others, which resulted in them finding the overall sound of the Nuraphone to be on the brighter side.

We feel the Nura Nuraphone’s mid-range is also pretty good. Vocals and lead instruments feel accurately reproduced. Due to the slightly overemphasized bass, they might feel a bit cluttered, especially if you boost up the immersion mode.

The graph of the treble range looks pretty accurate to what we heard. Vocals and instruments have a lot of detail and brightness, and the higher frequencies like sibilants (S and T sounds) are very sharp and piercing. People in the office who didn’t hear as much bass found them to be on the bright side, while people who did get bass felt that their overall sound profile was hyped without being too piercing.

The Nura Nuraphone's stereo imaging is good, and we don’t trust the numbers we got in this test. We think they might be due to how we tested the Nuraphone or because the personalization algorithm doesn’t work well with dummy heads. Regardless, after subjective listening, we think they produce tight bass and a transparent treble. Additionally, the L/R drivers of our unit seemed well-matched in amplitude and frequency. This ensures an accurate placement and localization of objects (voices, instruments, footsteps) in the stereo image.

We found the Nura Nuraphone's soundstage to be quite decent. As the graph shows, there’s a decent amount of activation due to their unique design, and the notch around the 10kHz creates a natural and fairly open soundstage. However, their closed-back design doesn’t make them as open-sounding as critical listening open-backs.

The Nura Nuraphone's noise isolation is good. They have an active noise cancelling (ANC) system that was added in a software update. However, it was challenging to test these headphones as their unique in-ear tips are built into the over-ear cups, and they rely on skin connectivity to stay powered on. As a result, the score they received in this test doesn't reflect real-life usage. You can see a more detailed description of our testing process here.

While our graph indicates that the ANC doesn't reduce much more noise than their passive isolation capabilities, we noticed a difference in real-life use. The ANC can cut down a significant amount of bass-range noise like the rumbling of bus or plane engines as well as the high-pitched hum of an AC fan. They also help block out a significant amount of mid-range noise like ambient chatter. Overall, their ANC performs similarly to that of the Apple AirPods Max Wireless.

Since the mid and treble ranges are coming out of the earbud tips, these headphones practically don’t leak. You can listen to them at high volumes without disturbing people surrounding you, even in fairly quiet environments.

The Nura Nuraphone’s integrated microphone has passable recording quality. Speech recorded and transmitted with this mic will sound fairly full-bodied and clear, but might sound a bit muffled and lacking in detail a bit.

The Nura Nuraphone's microphone is decent at noise handling. It can separate speech from background noise in moderately loud situations like a busy street but won’t do as well in louder environments like a subway station.

The Nura Nuraphone have a great battery performance. Although Nura advertises them to roughly 20 hours of battery life, we measured over 35 hours of continuous playtime. Battery performance can vary depending on usage, so your real-life experience may vary. That said, they also only take about two and a half hours to fully charge, and they have a 'Standby mode' that allows them to automatically go into a deep sleep mode after one minute of being off your head. However, they won't enter this mode if you keep them on and stop playing music. Unfortunately, they don't support audio while charging. When plugged in, the Bluetooth connection turns off as soon as the USB cable is connected to the headphones, and you can't use their controls.

The Nura App is practically a necessity when using the Nuraphone. This app is what you’ll use to personalize your profile. The app goes through a series of tests to try and figure out how your ears hear. It will then personalize your sound profile to match the targeted audio reproduction. You can have up to three different profiles. The “immersion mode” is for how much bass you want to have in the over-ear section of the headphones. You can also enable their ANC or talk-through mode and map their control scheme for each cup. While there are no room effects, playback control, or an actual EQ, the app is still a great tool that personalizes your experience with these headphones.

The Nura Nuraphone are Bluetooth-compatible. Unfortunately, they can’t be used with multiple devices simultaneously, which was expected due to their personalization features, and can’t connect via NFC. They have high latency using SBC, aptX, and aptX HD codecs, meaning that they might not be ideal for watching video content. Their latency is also high on iOS devices, although it's a bit lower on Android devices. However, you might not notice the delay since some devices and apps offer some sort of compensation.

You can use Nura Nuraphone wired via their USB charging cable. However, they only support audio using this connection, so you can't use their mic, and they aren't compatible with gaming consoles. You can purchase a proprietary analog audio cable from Nura separately, but it only provides audio too.

These headphones don’t have a dock.