Headphones with a HEARING TEST??
The Audeara A-01’s are a rather unique pair of over ear, noise cancelling headphones. They are definitely premium at a cool £200, but they’ve got one, well, unique, feature – a built in hearing test.
You’re probably thinking that’s just some kind of gimmick, right? To be honest, I did when I got the email offering them, but after setting them up and doing the “Ultimate Precision” test, I was genuinely surprised. To make sure it wasn’t just a gimmick where on the “0%” personalisation setting just nerfed the EQ settings and just reverted their changes as you go up the scale, I also A/B tested with my Blue Lola headphones, which are equally expensive, and brilliant quality.
Much to my surprise, with the personalisation slider set to 50%, the A-01’s were – subjectively – edging out in quality over the Lola’s. With the full 100% the sound was much too harsh for me personally, so the 50% mark seems to be the sweet spot for now.
So now you know they actually work and aren’t just a gimmick, let’s run you through what else they’ve got going for them. First thing is connectivity, you’ve got both a 4 pole 3.5mm jack on the left ear cup, and bluetooth with works rather well and has impressive range.
You’ve got 3 absolutely tiny buttons next to the headphone jack which work well, when you can actually press them, and it’s got a built in battery that in “eco mode”, ie bluetooth and “audeara effect” on that’ll give you ~35 hours of usage, with “flight mode”, ie active noise cancelling and line in offering up to 65 hours.
Since we are talking about the noise cancelling, it’s activated by a toggle on the right ear cup and is actually pretty great. It does dim the audio quality a tad, but did a brilliant job of cancelling the white noise I blasted from my PCs speakers, so should do just fine with flights and travel.
If you are going to be wearing these for 65 hours of flying anyway, they’ve got to be comfortable. Sadly, the A-01’s aren’t perfect in this respect. They aren’t terribly uncomfortable, but the thin and minimally padded headband I found dug into my head after a while of use although the clamping force wasn’t too bad though, and the ear cups are pretty nice and make a very good seal to limit noise ingress.
Moving over to the software side of things, setup requires you to make an account, and allow their app location data – something they say is to “help find your headphones” – but I find annoying that they lockout the app until you allow it. The audio test has a couple of different options, you’ve got the “standard” 8 point test, “High detail” with is 16 points, and “ultimate precision” which is 32. I don’t really see a point in you spending £200 on headphones and not take the most detailed test, but if you are in a rush you’ve got some options.
The test is pretty simple, you lower the volume of each tone until you can barely hear it, for both ears separately, then it generates an equalizer profile that it applies to the headphones. You technically only need the app to set them up once, as the profile is saved to the headphones and not run through the app.
So, are these rather unique headphones worth their price tag? Well, for me personally, I really like them. I’ve definitely got some level of hearing loss – probably too much for a 20 something year old – so the perceived quality of these is actually better than basically anything I have to hand. They aren’t the most comfy things in the world, but they stay on your head well and besides a rattling coming from inside the ratcheting mechanism, the overall quality is pretty nice too. They might not be for everyone, but they are for me.
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Products shown provided by: Audeara
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