Living with Nothing’s Headphone A: monster battery life, weird EQ, and sweaty ears

Living With Nothing’s Headphone A: The Sequel That (Mostly) Makes Sense

The first time I put on Nothing’s Headphone A, I had this immediate thought: “Oh, this is what the original Headphone 1 should’ve been.” Lighter on the head, cheaper on the wallet, ridiculously better battery life, and still very much a “Nothing” product the moment you touch the controls.

I’ve been using the Headphone A as my main over-ears for a couple of weeks now, bouncing between gaming sessions on my PC, music on an Android phone using LDAC, and calls on an iPhone. They’ve replaced my bulkier pairs for commutes and late-night sessions – but not without a couple of frustrating caveats, especially if you care about call quality or tend to run hot around the ears.

Nothing has clearly stripped down the Headphone 1 formula to hit a $199 price while promising up to 135 hours of battery life. That number sounds like marketing nonsense until you realize you can actually go days without even thinking about a charger. The trade-offs come in build, mic performance, and some quirks in how the EQ works. By the time I’d hit my first full workweek with them, I felt like I understood exactly who these are for – and who should probably look elsewhere.

Key Takeaways After Living With Them

• Massive battery life (up to 135 hours with AAC and ANC off) is no joke; you’ll charge these way less than most rivals.
• Mechanical controls are among the most satisfying and practical I’ve used on any modern pair of headphones.
• Out-of-the-box sound is too bassy and bright, but the 8-band parametric EQ lets you fix a lot – if you’re willing to tinker.
• ANC is decent for the $199 price, especially with low-frequency rumble, but nowhere near Sony/Bose/AirPods flagships.
• Call quality is a real weak point: compressed, sometimes hard to understand in noisy places.
• Comfort is mixed: light and stable, but sweaty ear cups and noticeable clamping pressure over longer sessions.
• Plastic build and soft carrying bag feel cheap next to premium rivals, but at least you get IP52 dust/splash resistance.

Design, Build, And Comfort: Subdued Sci‑Fi With Sweaty Consequences

Nothing’s aesthetic has always felt like someone tried to design gear for a near-future hacker movie. The Headphone A keep that vibe but tone it down compared to the Headphone 1. Instead of the fully transparent top section, you get an opaque oval cap (white, black, yellow, or pink) sitting on a more transparent ear shell. It’s still recognizably Nothing, but it doesn’t scream across the train carriage quite as loudly.

The rectangular cups with that little RCA-style red square on the right and white on the left are a neat touch. It’s a small nod to old-school AV gear that actually helps when you’re fumbling to put them on in the dark. Build-wise, though, it’s obvious this is a $199 pair. The housing and headband are very plasticky. Not fragile, but more “well-finished toy” than premium. The good news: the swivel hinges feel more solid than on the Headphone 1, and the whole thing is lighter, which matters if you’re wearing them for hours.

Comfort was where my feelings started to split. The memory-foam ear pads are plush and seal well, and the headband padding is generous enough. For the first 30-40 minutes, they’re fine — even good. But after a couple of hours at my desk or a longer gaming session, the clamping force around the lower part of my ears became noticeable. The pressure never turned into outright pain, but I found myself taking short breaks more often than I do with something like Sony’s WH line or Bose’s latest.

The bigger issue for me was heat. The Headphone A are IP52 rated, which is more protection than a lot of pricier headphones bother with, so you don’t have to panic if you get caught in a light drizzle or if you sweat a bit. But the pads just don’t breathe. During an unusually warm February afternoon, I was sweating around my ears in under 20 minutes of walking. Indoors, in a normal room, it’s manageable, but if you run warm or plan to use these in hotter climates, expect “ear sauna” moments.

And then there’s the carrying solution. Instead of a hard case, you get a soft bag. It’s fine for keeping dust off in a backpack, but it doesn’t offer real protection. Between the plastic build and the floppy bag, the whole package feels a bit cheaper than the design language pitches — though at $199, I get why Nothing made that call.

Controls That Actually Feel Designed For People

The part of the Headphone A that I immediately fell in love with is the control scheme. Nothing stuck with the same physical layout as the Headphone 1: a mechanical volume roller, a paddle for skipping tracks, and a single button that can trigger the voice assistant or other functions.

The roller might be my favorite volume control on any recent headphone. Scroll up, volume up; scroll down, volume down. Click it in to play or pause. Long-press to toggle between ANC and transparency. No need to memorize a secret handshake of taps and swipes on a touch panel that misreads half your gestures — you just use it like a tiny wheel. I did wish the roller had a tad more resistance; on walks, I sometimes jumped a couple of volume notches past where I wanted. But I’ll still take this over any finicky touch interface.

The paddle on the back of the cup handles track skipping: flick it forward or back to change tracks, hold it to scrub through. That longer press doesn’t work in every app (it behaved in Apple Music but not in Qobuz for me), which is annoying, but not a dealbreaker. The lone button is customizable in the Nothing X app: you can switch it from voice assistant to things like muting the mic, adjusting noise control, firing the camera shutter on your phone, or selecting an EQ preset.

As someone who regularly tests headphones while half-distracted between games, music, and work calls, this layout just works. I rarely had to take the headphones off to check what I was pressing, and I almost never mis-triggered anything. If Nothing ever abandons this system for full touch controls, I’ll be genuinely annoyed.

Sound Quality: Rough Default, Surprisingly Flexible Once You Tinker

The first night with the Headphone A, I threw on The Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1” — mostly because it’s a track I know inside out. With the default “Balanced” profile, the cymbals and upper harmonics jumped out in a way that felt wrong. Sibilants had a splashy edge, and the top end got a bit harsh at higher volumes. At the same time, the bass was thicker than I like. The kick and low toms punched harder than the mix really calls for.

That impression carried across other tracks. On Soundgarden’s “Spoonman,” the low toms turned into more of a boomy thud than the textured slam I expect. Radiohead’s “There There” had its toms ringing a bit too long. The midrange itself — vocals, guitars, pianos — sat in a decent place, but everything above and below felt exaggerated.

Then I opened the Nothing X app, and the story changed pretty quickly.

You get two layers of EQ control: a simple three-band setup (bass, mids, treble from -6 to +6) and a full 8-band parametric EQ. The latter is shockingly powerful for a $199 pair. You can set the center frequency, gain, and Q (bandwidth) for each band, which is the kind of thing I’m used to in audio editing software, not consumer headphones.

It’s not entirely intuitive, though. Most headphone EQs I’ve used simply boost or cut the selected band. Here, when you nudge one band up, it feels like Nothing is lowering the others instead to keep the overall loudness in check. It’s probably a safety play to protect people’s ears, but it made my usual EQ instincts feel a bit off. I ended up spending a decent chunk of time adjusting, listening, and readjusting until the sound finally clicked into place.

Once I pulled down a chunk of the 100-250Hz range and gently tamed everything above about 6kHz, the Headphone A landed in a much better zone. The bass still had weight and impact for electronic stuff and ’90s rock, but it wasn’t bloated. The highs kept their detail without scraping at my ears. At that point, these started to sound legitimately good for the price, especially over LDAC on Android with higher-bitrate tracks.

If you’re the type of person who never touches EQ, though, be aware: I don’t think the default sound is going to please everyone. It leans consumer-friendly (boosted lows and highs), but to my ears, it overshoots. The silver lining is that the tools are there to fix it, and they go deeper than nearly any similarly priced rival.

ANC And Call Quality: Great For You, Not So Great For Them

Noise cancellation on the listening side is surprisingly solid for the money. You get multiple strength settings plus an adaptive mode. Cranking ANC up to maximum did a nice job of shaving off low-frequency rumble — bus engines, distant traffic, the hum of a PC under my desk. In my daily use, they held up better than Sony’s budget-focused Ult headphones and roughly on par with what I’ve heard from the Soundcore Space One Pro.

They don’t touch the high-end big three — Sony’s 1000X line, Bose’s current flagships, or Apple’s AirPods Max — especially with mid-to-high frequency noise. Keyboard clacks, nearby voices, and the higher-pitched whine of fans still poked through. Pushing ANC to the stronger settings seemed to trade a bit of high-frequency intrusion for better low-end blocking, which is a trade I was mostly okay with on planes and in cafés.

The real disappointment is on the microphone side. The Headphone A use three mics (one less than the Headphone 1) to pick up your voice and cancel out background noise, but in practice, they struggle once the environment gets busy. During a call while walking along a fairly loud street, the traffic dropped to a distant, fizzy hiss, which is what you want — but my voice went along with it. Listening back to a recording of that call, there were sections where words were heavily compressed or just smeared into mush. Even I couldn’t make out some phrases clearly, and I knew what I’d been trying to say.

In quieter rooms, calls are passable. Not amazing, not terrible, just “fine.” But if you’re planning to use these as your main work-from-home or commute call headset, there are better options. An older, cheaper pair like the non-pro Soundcore Space One gives you clearer speech for significantly less cash. For a product that otherwise feels modern and well thought out, the mic situation sticks out as the most dated-feeling part of the package.

Battery Life, Connectivity, And Everyday Use

Battery is where the Headphone A step into “are you serious?” territory. Nothing quotes up to 135 hours using AAC with ANC off, or up to 75 hours with ANC on. Switch to LDAC and those numbers drop to a still-massive 90 hours (ANC off) or 62 hours (ANC on). In practice, with a mix of AAC and LDAC, mostly with ANC on, I went more than a full workweek plus some weekend gaming before I felt even remotely worried about the percentage.

I’m used to topping up most ANC cans every couple of days. With the Headphone A, I had to remind myself to check the battery at all. For travel or anyone constantly forgetting to charge devices, this is almost reason enough to consider them.

Connectivity is equally painless. You get Bluetooth 5.4 with support for SBC, AAC, and LDAC. No aptX variants, but LDAC on Android sounded great with high-res sources and stayed mostly stable in my testing. Multipoint works well: once it’s enabled in the app, the headphones can stay connected to two devices at once. I had them tied to a laptop and a phone, and swapping between a YouTube video on one and Spotify on the other was usually as simple as pausing one and hitting play on the other. No digging into Bluetooth menus, no random drops.

Wired connections are a little stranger. You can plug in via USB‑C or the 3.5mm jack, and both cables are in the box, but there’s no true passive mode. The headphones still need to be powered on, and as soon as a cable is connected, Bluetooth and the app connection shut off. That means no on-the-fly EQ tweaking or ANC strength changes while you’re wired; they’ll just use whatever settings were active when you plugged in. You can charge over USB‑C while using Bluetooth, though, which saved me on one especially long day.

Day to day, I mostly forgot about them in the best way — aside from the heat buildup and occasional clamp fatigue. On PC, they pulled double duty for gaming and music without noticeable latency issues for casual play. For competitive shooters, I’d still go wired with something more specialized, but for Diablo marathons or story-heavy games, they were more than fine.

Who The Headphone A Make Sense For

After living with the Headphone A, they slotted into a very specific lane in my mental gear catalog.

If you care about:

• Battery life above almost everything else
• Having real buttons and a volume wheel instead of touch controls
• Being able to dial in your own sound signature with deep EQ tools
• A distinctive (but slightly toned-down) aesthetic at a mid-range price

…then the Headphone A make a lot of sense. They’re a more grounded, practical version of the Headphone 1. Cheaper, lighter, still very “Nothing,” but easier to recommend to normal people who don’t want their headphones to look like a concept car.

On the other hand, if you:

• Take a lot of calls in noisy environments
• Want top-tier ANC to really erase the world around you
• Hate sweaty ears or have a low tolerance for clamp pressure
• Expect a more premium-feeling build and a sturdy case

…you’re going to run into the limits of this design pretty quickly. At $199, those compromises aren’t shocking, but they are worth being honest about. There are cleaner-sounding, better-calling, more comfortable options if you’re willing to stretch the budget — or accept less style in exchange for practicality.