Earlier this year, Nothing got some attention for its first over-ear headphones. The Nothing Headphone (1) have an eye-catching squarish design and the company’s signature transparent elements. Now Nothing has upgraded its Nothing Ear (3) noise-canceling earbuds. Performance has improved but Nothing has also added a unique feature that may overshadow some of those performance improvements: a “super” microphone integrated into its charging case, which improves call-calling performance. The new buds come in white or black and are available for preorder now at $179 (£179).
I’ll get to the performance upgrades in a minute, but let’s get right to that Super Mic in the case. Nothing says it’s a dual-microphone system “driven by ambient-filtering technology that focuses on your voice and cuts through surrounding noise up to 95 dB, ensuring crystal-clear calls in any environment.” You activate it by pressing the Talk button on the case, and can double tap the Talk button to leave the microphone in the case on.
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Test calls on the Nothing Ear (3)
I made some initial calls in the noisy streets of New York using the microphones in the earbuds. According to Nothing, each earbud is equipped with three directional microphones combined with a bone-conduction Voice Pick-up Unit (the VPU detects micro-vibrations from the jaw and ear canal, converting them into electrical signals for precise voice pickup). There’s also a multichannel AI environmental noise-cancellation system that Nothing says has been trained on over 20 million hours of real-world audio to isolate your voice and suppress wind noise. That’s a lot of hours.
Callers were generally impressed with what they heard. They said they could hear me clearly while the buds did a good job reducing almost all of the background noise around me. When I just used the buds’ microphones, voice-calling performance was top tier.
When I switched to the Super Mic in the case, it didn’t dramatically affect the call quality. But callers said my voice sounded more natural and less digitized and robotic when I started speaking into the case, which I was careful to hold correctly in my hand for optimal performance.
Outside of calls, you can also use the Super Mic to record notes or conversations. Nothing has an Essential Space ideas feature on its phones, and you can record directly to it from the charging case using the Super Mic. Your voice notes sync to Essential Space and are automatically transcribed.
The charging case looks similar to the charging case for the previous model but it feels heavier and more substantial. It’s now tricked out with metal instead of being fully plastic. “The charging case is crafted from 100% recycled aluminium and finished through 27 precision processes,” Nothing states. “Nano injection moulding fuses metal and plastic, removing the need for glue and achieving tight tolerances for a seamless, compact unibody.”
For a moment I wished there was a speaker built into it, so you could turn it into a mini speakerphone. But the speakers in your phone would probably sound as good, so I dismissed that idea pretty quickly.
Trouble with the ear tips
One of things that hasn’t changed for me with Nothing earbuds is that the none of the included tips allowed me to get a tight seal. Nothing clearly spends a lot of time coming up with innovative, eye-catching designs for its products, but I would suggest it spends a little more time on ear tip design as Apple has done with the AirPods Pro 3. While the tips should fit a high percentage of ears just fine, I suspect that a certain percentage of users won’t be able to get a truly tight seal.
When I first tried on the buds with Nothing’s largest ear tips, I thought, “Wow, these sound mediocre and the noise canceling isn’t all that good.” But then I put the tips that I was using on my 2nd-gen model on the new buds (my own larger tips from another set of earbuds) and suddenly everything sounded a lot better and the noise canceling became quite good. It’s not up to the level of what you get with the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen) and AirPods Pro 3, but the noise canceling was pretty competitive once I got a tight seal. It’s come a long way from the noise canceling on Nothing’s original Ear earbuds.
Nothing says its Real-time Adaptive Noise Cancellation (up to 45 dB in the buds) adjusts to your surroundings every 600 milliseconds and monitors fit-related leakage every 1,875 milliseconds, updating the cancellation profile continuously, “so isolation stays consistent as you move.”
The Ear (3) also has an upgraded 12mm dynamic driver that has a “patterned diaphragm” that Nothing says results in a 20% larger radiating area when compared to the previous generation, boosting bass response by 4-6 dB and treble by up to 4 dB for a wider soundstage, cleaner highs, and rich mids.
I definitely heard the improved bass response and wider soundstage. The clarity also seemed slightly improved, but overall there’s a touch of bass push that gives the buds a warmer sound profile out of the box. It should appeal to a lot of folks and works well with a lot of today’s music.
I did think the AriPods Pro 3 offered a noticeable step up in sound quality, with better overall clarity and bass definition. But the Nothing Ear (3) sound quite respectable (if not exceptionally good) and deliver a pretty dynamic listening experience with good bass energy — if you get a tight seal, of course).
New Metal-Insulator-Metal antenna
Nothing says it has refined the design of the buds with polished metal accents that show throw the transparent casing on the buds. A custom Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) antenna, just 0.35 mm thick, improves total radiated power by 15% and signal sensitivity by 20% compared to the previous generation.
That antenna is support to ensure “strong connections on the move” but I did encounter a bit of interference at some street intersections in New York City that led to some very brief connectivity glitches. I didn’t encounter any of these glitches when testing Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 at the same intersections (having tested so many earbuds, I’m familiar with the spots where there’s typically a lot of wireless interference). This happened to me with the previous Nothing Ear model, though Nothing make some improvements with connectivity in that model with some firmware updates via the Nothing X app for iOS and Android.
The Ear (3) use Bluetooth 5.4 and have support for the SBS, AAC and LDAC audio codecs (many Android smartphoine support the LDAC codec). And it’s worth noting that both the buds and case have an IP54 rating, which means they’re splash proof and dust-resistant.
Better battery life
Nothing has equipped each buds with an upgraded 55 mAh battery, which brings up listening time to up to 10 hours (a single-charge increase of 90 minutes compared to the previous model), with an additional 28 hours with the case. A rapid 10-minute USB-C charge provides up to 10 hours of playback and the buds feature wireless charging to go along with USB-C charging. I’m still checking whether these numbers are for noise canceling on or noise canceling off.
Nothing Ear (3) final first impressions
While Nothing’s flagship noise canceling earbuds look very similar to their predecessor, they do feature some welcome improvements to their performance, including bumped up sound quality along with better noise-canceling and voice-calling performance. I once again ran into some trouble with their ear tips and had to use tips from another set of earbuds I’ve tested (Sennheiser and Bowers & Wilkins tips work best for my ears). While that doesn’t mean you won’t get a good fit, I think Nothing should look at the design of its tips and perhaps offer a larger size at the very least.
I’m still trying to decide how useful the Super Mic in the case is, but it certainly is a unique feature. I’ll be testing the buds for a few more days and will post some additional thoughts in my full review, including some comments on their transparency mode and controls along with tweaks you can make in the app.
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