The Audeara A-01 headphones actually wish to be excellent.
Geared toward producing a tailor-made listening expertise, the Audeara A-01 headphones have been developed in tandem with medical professionals. Very similar to you’d put on prescription glasses matched to the capabilities and weaknesses of your eyes, Audeara hopes to supply an audio machine you’ll be able to calibrate to your personal listening wants.
The corporate has some curious beginnings with its first pair of headphones, having come into being with a crowdfunding marketing campaign on Kickstarter.
The audio startup managed to boost over $450,000 in Australia, the place the corporate relies (round $350,000, or £260,000).
With a said mission to “ship excellent sound, all the time”, do the A-01s reside up the hype?
Design
The design of the Audeara A-01 headphones is basically understated. The simple black headphones are available a easy, matte end, with the Audeara emblem evenly embossed on the skin earcups.
These are very well-made headphones and each part of the construct boasts the identical premium craftsmanship.
The earcups provide plush padding, with a tender underside to the band to reduce the stress exerted in your head. The left and proper cups are additionally clearly marked on the within mesh, that means you should not discover that you’ve got unintentionally swapped your two carefully-calibrated ears round.
The buttons alongside the sting of every cup are satisfyingly tactile, with the texture of a bakelite radio, and are comparatively straightforward to search out along with your arms.
We had a slight concern, nevertheless, with the dimensions. We discovered the cups comfortable – if not barely stifling – they usually shortly warmed up in our check, though the premium-feel padding on the cups and band ensured stage of consolation all through.
The band may solely prolong a really brief distance. Whereas it ought to match most customers, some might discover they arrive up barely on the small facet.
A tailor-made listening expertise
To make clear, the Audeara A-01 headphones will not be prepared out of the field.
Once we first put the headphones on, we discovered that any music we performed got here out in a considerably flat, uninteresting tone. The audio is splendidly clear, however missing a lot presence for highs and lows.
They seemed like listening to a speaker a slight distance away: audible, clear, however far much less immersive than we’d hope for the worth.
This practically all modifications if you begin tinkering with Audeara’s EQ app.
Downloaded to your cellphone from the App Retailer or Google Play, Audeara’s app primarily lets you fine-tune your audio output throughout varied excessive, mid, and low frequencies – a course of that’s carried out individually for each ears.
Audeara’s ambition is to mean you can create your personal ‘prescription’ in your ears, in the identical approach as a watch check would create a prescription for a brand new pair of glasses.
The shortest ‘ear check’ takes you thru 10 distinct frequencies, enjoying a variety of successive beeps when you tweak the prominence of every frequency on a sliding scale – very similar to the blending desk controls in a recording studio.
We totally suggest making use of the longest check (round 15 minutes) to maximise the enhancements to your listening expertise.
We discovered ourselves repeatedly leaping again into the app to tweak the output and see what impact it had on varied songs on our playlist.
For a hobbyist who needs to experiment, with out investing in additional advanced enhancing software program, you could possibly fortunately spend hours tinkering with the frequencies to see the outcomes; others, nevertheless, might discover the method considerably time-consuming.
Efficiency
The Audeara A-01s provide just about what we would anticipate from a premium set of headphones. They arrive with full Bluetooth four.2 performance for wi-fi play, alongside a welcome three.5mm headphone jack for these wanting a tethered connection.
Additionally they provide lively noise cancelling, an usually indispensable characteristic in crowded areas or on a morning commute. There is a noticeable enchancment with it activated, although we discovered the pure sound isolation on these comfortable, well-padded headphones not often required the extra assist.
Even when utilizing the headphones in wi-fi mode with lively noise cancelling, they need to final you for a powerful 35 hours, with that extending to 65 hours with noise cancelling disabled. You will not have the ability to cost and play on the similar time, however the battery life will imply you will not come throughout this challenge fairly often.
The stress on readability, and on highlighting the frequencies your ears might naturally battle to select up, means you do not actually require a booming output to listen to the element on every observe. This additionally means the headphones chorus from leaping to a sound stage they cannot preserve with out distortion.
The flipside of that is that you just actually cannot crank up the quantity very far.
The Audeara A-01s are headphones which are designed to care in your ears, and also you’re in no hazard of bursting your eardrums. Whereas the audio high quality cannot be faulted, the managed soundstage can really feel barely restricted in that regard.
They’re actually finest fitted to devoted listening classes the place audio element is essential – say with instrumental, classical, or pop – reasonably than cranking out head-banging rock or bass-heavy dance tracks. These are headphones for appreciating music, not getting misplaced in it.
Even after tweaking our EQ prescription to spice up the bass, we discovered the headphones stronger for blasting, say, Tina Turner’s vocals than the beats on Deadmau5’s Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff.
And we discovered that attempting to ‘recreation’ the system to regulate this might simply throw our calibration off-balance. Whereas the customization affords large scope to particular person listeners, it additionally requires a stage of dedication and a focus to get the complete advantages.
Verdict
Audeara has got down to ship ‘excellent sound’. And for the suitable listener, with the suitable genres of music, calibrated accurately, that is what the Audeara A-01 headphones provide.
We by no means discovered the soundstage as immersive as these created by different premium over-ear headphones at this value vary, such because the Sennheiser Momentum Wireless.
However in providing a extremely customized listening expertise, and displaying extra consideration in your eardrums than many producers, the Audeara A-01 headphones present a stage of care and customization that’s far forward of the competitors.