Nura was founded in 2016 by Luke Campbell and Dragan Petrovic, which set to perfect a sound personalization solution based on existing hearing research and measuring each user's hearing, adapting the frequency response matched to each listener. The company's first product, the Nura Headphone was a crowdfunding success and Nura managed to survive the initial product ramp-up effort (which should be shared by the creators in a book as a valuable lesson about the challenges of crowdfunding and sourcing and manufacturing in China).
Nura now launched its third product, the Nura True, the company’s first true wireless earbuds, managing to support the same automatic hearing test, ANC, Transparency, and “immersion” features as offered in the Nura Loop and the original Nura Headphone.
The Nura True is an interesting in-ear design that is not very different from the original protuberance in the Nura Headphone. These have been received with a lot of criticism - and jokes - among traditional headphone users, which never accepted the idea of their ears being penetrated by "a nipple" (to be kind and not call it what many others said about the in-ear tip in the Nura Headphones.
From the outside though, the Nura True is a large 25mm circle that reminds us of the Microsoft TWS design - distinctive and practical after you get used to its visibility. In fact, the large circle does provide an improved passive noise isolation, helping to make the active noise cancelling process and the work of the in-ear and outer-ear microphones more effective. It also helps to support the large dynamic drivers and all the circuits. The product is specified as a Bluetooth 5 platform supporting Bluetooth QuickSwitch and Qualcomm's aptX codec, with a battery holding up to 6 hours, and 24 hours available on the USB-C case.
Nura's personalization is the strong differentiator for the Nura True earbuds - and will finally expose a much larger user base to the company's excellent implementation of unique hearing profiles. The personalization works by playing a range of tones and measure an Otoacoustic Emission (OAE), which every ear generates in response to these tones. Encoded in the returning sound wave is information about our unique hearing, and Nura synthesizes this information with it's self-learning engine to create a personalized hearing profile. This is done through the Nura app.
The personalized hearing profile is then stored and can be switched on or off by the user, helping to enhance music enjoyment enormously - to the shock of purists who believe that headphones should always deliver the same target frequency response to every user and not interfere with the artists' - and manufacturers' "tuning" - intents. Better even, every time the user creates its unique hearing profile, the app generates an abstract and unique colored graphic bubble that the user can post on social media as its unique "hearing fingerprint" - which is a great marketing idea.
Each earbud touch controls can be customized directly in the app, for transport controls, volume, switch ANC or transparency mode, or activating smartphone features or voice assistants, depending on the connected smartphone. Nura calls its transparency "Social mode" and the ANC mode as “Immersion mode”.
The Nura app requires an Internet connection when setting up the hearing profile - since the process is handled from a central server - but, after that, the user can access the app in offline mode. The price of the Nura True earbuds ($229.99) is very reasonable considering this is an ANC, sweat-resistant IPX4 design.
www.nuraphone.com
