Test: Nothing CMF Headphone Pro

British Nothing is founded by Carl Pei who before that started Oneplus. Oneplus managed, thanks to a smart branding work, to appear as a lively upstart despite being part of Oppo, one of the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturers. The attitude is also recognizable at Nothing, which invests in designs that are noticeable and gimmicks that attract attention, while their products are often excellent in their own right. Their sub-brand CMF brings these features to the cheaper price ranges, and the CMF Headphone Pro is Nothing’s second Over Ear headphone and the first under the CMF name.

The design of the CMF Headphone Pro feels lively and to the extent that they are plastic, it is something you approve of with glossy plastic surfaces. Most on-ear headphones look pretty much the same, but the CMF Headphone Pro doesn’t. Headsets are available in the colors light grey, dark gray and mint green. The ear cups themselves are also available separately in orange. Nothing points out that you can mix the colors by changing the ear cups by simply unscrewing them. I wouldn’t think of buying a pair of ear cups in a different color just to get a personal style, but on the other hand, the memory foam in the ear cups tends to wear out over time, and then it’s good that you can easily replace them. It should be added that the ear cups are really comfortable and quite light for their size. They cannot be folded, but the covers can be folded to the side and it comes with a bag to keep them in.

Interesting buttons

The headset has a total of four controls with which you control it, and here too Nothing is a bit original. On the one hand, we have a mouse-like scroll wheel that you can use to adjust the volume or play and pause music, as well as switch between noise reduction and hear-through. We have a button for on/off, a button for voice assistant and finally a slider for bass. The latter is an original idea, and I can see the point if you like boosted bass in your music, but not when listening to podcasts, for example. In practice, I think the bass control goes from “slightly enhanced bass” to “absurdly a lot of bass”.

You can change most of the buttons in the Nothing X app, so if you don’t use the voice assistant, for example, you can put the listening mode on that button instead. The slider can only be used to boost bass or treble.

One of Nothing’s typical gimmicks, then, but we shouldn’t forget that this is a pair of over-ear headphones for SEK 1,400, and considering that price, the music sound is really good. As we mentioned, the bass is a little turned up, but otherwise the sound is full and rich in detail, and you can get high-resolution sound via LDAC if you connect to an Android mobile.

In the app, you can also do a hearing test and get a customized sound profile according to your hearing. I think it works well. The hearing profile is saved in the headset, so you can connect it to another device and retain the sound setting.

Good noise reduction

As I said, the CMF Headphone Pro also has active noise reduction, in addition to the reduction that occurs from wearing a pair of earmuffs. The noise reduction mainly removes lower frequencies, for example the annoying engine noise from the bus that is getting old. It’s not the best noise canceling I’ve heard, but for the price tag it’s still really good. As an alternative to the noise reduction, you can switch on hear-through, so that the sounds of the surroundings are let through instead. It’s mainly useful if you’re out and about and risk not hearing a bicycle honking or a car honking at you, but it’s good enough for you to have a conversation with the headphones on. But then you can almost as easily take them off and wear them around your neck, I think.

The call sound can be described as average, that is, it sounds louder than when you talk on the mobile, but you are fully audible in a quiet or slightly noisy environment. If there is a lot of noise, it will be filtered out, but your call sound will suffer on the coup. However, average call sound is better than what I normally get in a pair of over-ear headphones at this price.

Battery life is another feature that distinguishes the CMF Headphone Pro. Nothing promises 100 hours on a charge, but that’s without noise reduction and high-resolution audio with LDAC. With noise reduction, the battery life is cut in half, which is still excellent. Five minutes of charging gives four hours of playtime with noise reduction on.

For most users, the gimmicks, that you can change the color of the ear cups and that you have a bass control, add no real benefit, but if they made you discover a headset that offers really good value for 1400 kroner, maybe they still served their purpose?