---
title: 'Nothing Headphone 1 Pro: They Copied the Wrong Thing!'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=rayrrXot17M'
video_id: 'rayrrXot17M'
date: 2026-09-29
duration_sec: 860
channel: 'Marques Brownlee'
---

# Nothing Headphone 1 Pro: They Copied the Wrong Thing!

> Source: [Nothing Headphone 1 Pro: They Copied the Wrong Thing!](https://youtube.com/watch?v=rayrrXot17M)

## Summary

The Nothing Headphone (1) Pro are a $400 pair of over-ear ANC headphones that aim to compete with premium rivals from Sony, Bose, and Apple. They feature a distinctive transparent design, triple-driver setup, and a unique 'flat' switch that bypasses sound processing for critical listening. While the sound quality is fun and the noise cancellation is impressive, a poorly designed charging case and slightly muddy sound keep them from being top-tier.

### Key Points

- **Competing in the premium headphone space** [00:14] — The Nothing Headphone (1) Pro enters the $400+ ANC headphone market, going up against Sony WH-1000XM6, Bose QC Ultra, Beats Studio Pro, and AirPods Max. They are the most expensive headphones Nothing has made.
- **Design evolution** [01:07] — The design retains Nothing's transparent aesthetic and cassette-like shape, using premium materials like aluminum frames, titanium arms, and 9H panda glass. They are slightly heavy but lighter than AirPods Max.
- **Best-in-class controls** [02:12] — The physical controls (rocker and roller) are considered the best in the headphone space: the roller adjusts volume and toggles ANC, and the paddle handles track skipping and scrubbing.
- **The 'flat' switch** [03:18] — A switch on the left ear cup disables all audio processing, giving a neutral sound signature for critical listening. This is a novel approach, letting the headphones serve both casual and professional users.
- **Triple driver setup** [04:43] — They use three drivers per ear for specialized frequency handling: bass (10Hz–10kHz), mid (5kHz–15kHz), and treble (10kHz–40kHz). This is meant to improve accuracy but isn't a guaranteed upgrade.
- **Sound quality** [05:58] — The default sound is a V-shaped EQ, fun but slightly less punchy and with weaker instrument separation than rivals. Overall sound quality is rated a 7 out of 10 compared to the 9 from top competitors.
- **Flat mode performance** [07:17] — Flipping to flat changes the sound to a neutral signature, like switching from a color-graded LUT to log footage. It removes the option for transparency but allows ANC to remain on.
- **Advanced EQ customization** [08:09] — The Nothing app offers an 8-band EQ with custom frequency selection, bandwidth, and gain, plus many presets, giving audio enthusiasts granular control.
- **Excellent noise cancellation** [08:40] — ANC is rated a solid 8 out of 10, effectively cancelling mid-frequency office sounds like keyboards and voices, thanks to good passive isolation from the ear cushions.
- **Call quality and transparency** [09:33] — Call quality is average despite 10 mics. Transparency mode is notably improved, sounding more natural and less muffled than the previous generation.
- **Battery and features** [10:28] — Battery life exceeds 30 hours with ANC on, supports Bluetooth 6.1 and multipoint, and has an IP52 rating for sweat resistance.
- **The terrible case** [10:55] — The hard-shell case is deemed the worst ever seen: it doesn't fold, leaves the headband exposed, lacks a charging passthrough, and feels cheaply made. It's a major downside.
- **The 2-in-1 tradeoff** [12:56] — The headphones attempt to be both fun and reference-oriented, but like most 2-in-1 devices, they are slightly worse at each. For $400, separate dedicated headphones might offer better value.
- **Competitive comparison** [13:36] — Sony WH-1000XM4s (re-released) are available for around $300 and offer better sound and ANC, while dedicated reference headphones under $400 provide more neutral sound.

## Transcript

So, Nothing, the company Nothing, has decided to jump into the ring of super premium, $400 plus active noise cancelling headphones. And this is where the heavy hitters have lived for years.
The Sony Mark 6s, the Bose QuietComfort Ultras, the new Beats 360s, the AirPods Max of course. The type of headphones where you literally just want to have the best of the best and you can't really have any major flaws anymore.
So these new Nothing Headphone 1 Pros are $400. The most expensive headphones they've ever tried to sell. It's got Pro in the name and everything. So, all right, you want to play with the big dogs? You're going to get tested like the big dogs.
So honestly, I do think they get a lot of things right with these. Okay, so they've made other headphones in the past that I've reviewed, and they've always been design-focused, and they've introduced some new features that are genuinely really nice for these Pros that match the name.
But they also, unfortunately, make one huge mistake by copying the wrong thing from a competition. And so we'll get to that shortly, too. But I do feel like since they're nothing headphones, I kind of have to start with the design. And so I will.
And I actually love the design of these headphones. They're like an evolution of the other nothing products, but even better. So it keeps the cassette tape square shape. And, of course, the transparent aesthetic that's become basically a nothing trademark over the past few years.
And then just kind of tweaks and refines it in little ways. Materials are all premium everywhere you touch. The ear and the headband cushions are super, super soft. It's aluminum frames, titanium arms, and then it's 9H panda glass on these sides to see inside.
And it's actually not the drivers you're looking at from the outside. It's just kind of a cool look, in my opinion, that kind of resembles the speaker drivers. But yeah, it's a cool shape. It's got textures and text and everything. The only thing that annoys me is how easily this glass gathers fingerprints,
because it does gather a lot of fingerprints very easily. That annoys me to no end. I also don't think it's too heavy. It is on the heavier side, and I definitely would have liked it to be a little bit lighter, and if they used more plastic, it would have been lighter.
But these weigh somewhere in between their all-plastic competition, but less than the AirPods Max. The AirPods Max are ridiculously heavy. I guess it's not saying much to be lighter than those, but they're somewhere in between.
Still has the red box on the right side. R for red, R for right. It's clever. And then on the back of the right-hand side, you always have the rocker and the roller. Rocker and roller. But I think are the best physical controls in the headphone space still.
Like, headphones are blind, so since you're wearing them on your head, you can't see the controls. And these are damn near perfect. You can always quickly identify them. The roller up top, you move forward or backwards to roll up or roll down the volume.
And it's also a button that you can press once to play pause or long press to turn A and C on and off. And it's super easy to find with your thumb. Then under it is a sort of flipper. They call it a paddle. and it's a forward track or backward track button.
And you can even scrub forward or backward through some media apps if you press and hold, which is cool. And then there's a single button on the outside of the right ear cup that just triggers your voice assistant by default. The more hidden buttons on the inside of the cups are the Bluetooth pairing button
on the right side, which makes sense. You probably only need that once or twice. And then on the other side is a new button. Up at the top left here, it's just a switch that says flat. And this here is very interesting.
Honestly, probably its most interesting feature. See, I'm about to talk about sound quality, but also with headphones, just like any other product you do have to think about the target demographic for that product as you evaluate it So like if I reviewing the Sennheiser HD 600s I trying to figure out how neutral and how flat that sound signature is when you actually go and use them
and you can actually appreciate your mix and hear everything the way it's supposed to sound. But if I'm reviewing the Beats 360s, I'm actually trying to figure out how good are they sounding listening to music, or watching movies, or cancelling out the sound from the airplane
that you're on when you're listening to them. Those are two totally different sound signatures, to totally different experiences, but they're both headphones. So these Nothing Headphones Pro are attempting to give you both.
They, of course, have their out-of-the-box baked-in sound, which you can, of course, adjust with the EQ, but they're also giving you the flat EQ switch, which they're saying totally cuts all audio processing and coloration
for when you need to hear the original track without any enhancements. And that, to me specifically, is a very interesting idea. Maybe it applies directly to me, because I'll often, you know, get on a plane or train and go to an event to make a video,
oftentimes the same pair of headphones that would be really good for listening to music on the plane is not the exact same pair of headphones that would be best for editing the video. But what if one pair of headphones could do both?
So Nothing has dropped the Cap Audio partnership from their last headphones, which, honestly, great. And they've actually moved to a triple driver setup. So there's now three drivers in each headphone instead of one, which sounds like an automatic upgrade, but not necessarily.
It's kind of like the megapixel number in cameras. Like, is the 200 megapixel camera guaranteed better than the 48 megapixel camera? No, of course not. But if you made a chart, there's probably some slight positive correlation.
I just remember when I first started getting into in-ear monitors, getting introduced to these 64 audio IEMs, they had like 18 drivers in them or something, which just sounds ridiculous. It was crazy to see, but this isn't their flagships, and it's not necessarily the best to have a ton of drivers.
But the idea is that each individual driver can sort of better specialize at certain sections of the frequency response range. So with these triple drivers, nothing is saying that there's one big bass driver that can handle 10 Hz up to 10 kHz.
Then there's a mid-sized precision driver that does 5 kHz to 15 kHz. and then the treble driver does 10 kHz all the way up to the top at 40 kHz. So, how do these things sound?
Well, big picture, I do think they sound really fun. They are a classic, very V-shaped EQ with plenty of bass and pretty distinct mids and bright highs. They have the whole range. There's an overall pretty colorful sound.
I would say the two biggest weaknesses for me were punchiness and the precision of the bass and instrument separation. So it's not that they're lacking bass, there's still plenty of it, it's just that it's not as responsive, it's not as punchy as I was hoping.
It's kind of like hitting a drum with a mitten over it, just a little bit less impact. But then the instrument separation is really the big one. Like, I did a lot of back-to-back listening with these, with the Sony XM6s, and with AirPods Max, and these sounded by far the most, like, muddied together of all the different sounds.
Again, it's a subtle thing. Like, there's all sorts of different instruments and sounds that you like to be able to pick out and hear as you're listening, and if you're paying this much you like to be able to do that and this was the weakest at that. So if the big dogs are like at a 9 with overall sound quality
then these are punching at like a 7, almost a 7. But then there's the flat switch right So when you flip to flat it removes the processing the EQ is literally disabled and so the sound completely changes in character It goes from that V to this pretty respectably neutral version with way less contrast way less bass
This also removes the option for transparency mode, but you can still have noise cancellation on while flat. And this is so interesting, even flipping back and forth between flat and not flat. I know you're not meant to flip back and forth between them like all the time,
but you can do that mid-song, and it's just, it's like watching a video with a Rec. 709 LUT on it, and then switching to watching in log, and suddenly uncovering all this extra detail that you weren't really meant to see,
but in all the shadows and all the highlights, and then flipping it back to the LUT, and it looks finished again, it looks fun again. And I actually did find that I enjoyed listening to some music more in flat mode. possibly because I'm so used to listening to the HD600s,
and that's like the signature I'm most comfortable with. Maybe that's why. But there was overall just more evenness to everything instead of the D-shape. I felt like I was hearing more, and that was interesting to see.
But even without that flat processing removal switch, the new EQ in the Nothing app is also way more powerful as far as adjusting exactly the way it sounds. So it still maxes out at eight bands, but you can choose exactly what frequency each point is at,
And you'll see it really granular with exactly how wide each band is and how much you want to change each piece here. Plus, there's a whole bunch more custom EQ presets you can load up for all different genres and listening experiences. So, there's just really good stuff in here for audio enthusiasts to explore dialing in exactly how these sound.
The noise cancellation part, though, is actually, I think, my favorite part. It's nice. It's smooth. these, for some reason, remove more of the mid-frequency office-type sounds,
like keyboards and voices and chairs and furniture moving, than AirPods Max or Sonys without being uncomfortable. I feel like when you turn the ANC way, way up, sometimes it gets a little bit much, but these do a good job of removing that stuff and not being harsh.
Hey, okay, Editor Marquez here. It turns out it's because of the steel. It's because these cushions are actually really good. and they do an amazing job of canceling out some of those faster, quicker sounds like voices and keyboards than the software would have.
Now, are they as good as the Sonys overall? No, but if the Sonys are a 9 in ANC, then these are close to an 8, which is better than expected. Also, this is what it would sound like if I got on a call with you and I was using these headphones as my microphone.
There's like 10 mics all around these for ANC, but perfectly average sounding voice. Yeah, for me. And the transparency mode, which comes with noise-camping headphones, is improved quite a bit, too.
I really didn't like the ones from the last generation, but these do a good job of sounding way less muffled and way less, like, talking into a can or, like, a flutter, and more, like, real. So I don't feel the need to take off the headphones when talking to people as much as I did before.
That's a good threshold to cross. And it's got a lot of those little things, you know? They connect via Bluetooth 6.1. So they do the fast pairing thing. They do support multi-point again. so you can have two different devices connected at once, so it's the rest of you Android phone and MacBook at the same time freaks like me.
These handle that no problem. Battery life is also still excellent. Technically downgraded a little bit from the last ones, but well over 30 hours of active noise cancellation listening, so that's plenty for me. I'm never going to wear these for that long.
They're great for traveling. And then they are IP52 rated, so you can work out in them and sweat in them if you really want to. I wouldn't, me personally, but I have also seen people go running an AirPods Max, so clearly that not stopping anyone So yeah go right ahead But they did do one stupid thing They did one one really really really dumb thing um and that this case This
uh, this is the dumbest, this is the worst case I've ever seen with headphones, weirdly. Like, for such a good rest of the, what were they thinking with this? Actually, I have a theory about what they were thinking. I think they saw AirPod's Max case and thought,
We should do that. But way worse. These headphones still don't fold, so you take them off, then you have to flip them over, and then they go in this hard-shelled plastic case like this, which is so bad.
What is this? You want your $400 headphones in this cheap, fingerprint-y plastic shell that clamps shut like a cheap Lego set or something? And on top of that, by the way, it's not even really very well built.
Like, it's only been a week of me using these, and I'm already seeing a little bit of wiggle on this weird plastic hinge. This just does not seem very durable. And there's no pass-through at all to charge the headphones. So at least, at least Apple thought of that and cut out a little flap to plug the headphones in.
These are a hard shell that you lock shut, so you have to open them just to charge them. Who thought of this? At least with the previous case, they were, like, fully enclosed, so I know they didn't fold also, but at least they're protected.
This now leaves the top band unprotected now, voluntarily. So when you try to put it in your bag or something, it will just catch on stuff. I don't know, man. I really cannot find one nice thing to say about this case.
You can attach lanyard stuff to the side for, like, keychains and stuff, I guess. This is almost ruining the headphones for me, honestly. This is so bad. I don't know why they did this.
it's kind of like the magic mouse charging situation where we can all admit it's bad, and it's just whether we choose to allow it to ruin it for us. That's the question. But look, one pair of headphones that can pull double duty as a fun listening pair of headphones
with decent bass and a huge range of EQ customization for music listening and movie watching, and then flip a switch and turn into my editing headphones when I need to do some more critical listening, that is compelling.
It's definitely not a need most people have with their headphones, but also, hey, it's right there on the name. Pro. We're not all pros, but pros might like that. But another one of my golden rules in tech is that 2-in-1 devices are rarely actually good at both things.
They're usually, in fact, a little bit worse at each thing to combine them. So like a 2-in-1 laptop is usually a slightly worse laptop than a dedicated laptop, and a slightly worse tablet than a dedicated tablet. And so for the headphones, it's still true.
You probably don't need one pair of headphones that does both of these things. And if you focus on just getting, like, a good-sounding pair of headphones, you can get better-sounding stuff for this price. The Sony stuff helps. Sony just basically re-released the Mark IVs, since everybody loved those so much.
And I'm seeing them on Amazon right now for, like, $300 right now, not $400. Those are better headphones. They sound better. The ANC is better. They fold up. But if you need reference headphones, of course, there's 1,000 neutral pairs you can find for under $400.
bucks. But the strength of these is giving you a switch to flip between a decent version of both of those types of headphones. And a pretty nice design and great controls, too. They're not perfect,
but I respect the execution. I do not respect the case at all, but I respect everything else. These are pretty cool. Good use of the word pro. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one.
Peace. Thank you.