The Nothing Ear 3A look great… and sound good enough

Nothing has had a strong visual identity since the Ear 1 were released in 2021 for $99 and challenged the notion that a highly featured headset requires a high price. The Ear 3A have the same transparent look as Nothing’s previous earbuds, with a clear case and stem design accented by a solid-colored body — this time adding a striking pink alongside yellow, black, and white options. And Nothing continues to improve both ANC and audio performance. But the Ear 3A also share the buggy performance that has plagued Nothing earbuds. While $99 is an attractive price for them, be ready to deal with some minor adaptive ANC and call quality issues.

The Ear 3A have 12mm dynamic drivers and support the high-res LDAC codec, along with SBC and AAC. Their default sound is very heavy on the bass, and while it gives bass lines extra punch, the midrange — which includes vocals and guitars — gets covered by the excessive low end. Bassheads might enjoy it, but it’s far too much for my taste, and I expect that will be the same for most people. Where I might ding some points for this on other earbuds, the Nothing 3A save themselves from that because of the robust EQ in the app. There’s a simple interface with four presets and a custom 3-band EQ, a nice 8-band parametric EQ that gives you more advanced adjustments, and some additional EQ profiles from users curated by Nothing.

In less than a minute I was able to adjust the EQ to something far more balanced to my ear (I added a downward slope to the bass below 115Hz, mid boost between 220–540Hz, another slight cut to the shouty frequencies between 2–3.5kHz, and some extra highs above 6.6kHz for a more open sound). It gave Chris Robinson’s voice more presence on “Thorn in My Pride” and his brother Rich and Marc Ford’s guitars nice crunch and bite as the song builds through the solo. And even with the cut to the low end, Johnny Colt’s bass supports the band throughout.

ANC performance is improved over previous Nothing earbuds, with solid cancellation particularly in the lower mids and bass range, so low drones like air conditioners or plane cabin noise get filtered out very well. For $99, they also do a decent job with higher frequencies, but if you plan to use them consistently in a coffee shop you’ll still hear orders being called out a bit. And if the high ANC setting is too much for you, there are mid and low settings that let in a bit more of the low end to ground you in reality.

There’s also an adaptive ANC setting, but here’s where some of the minor issues I encountered started. While out on walks around the neighborhood, occasionally (maybe two or three times during an hour walk) the ANC intensity would quickly adjust to let in much more ambient noise and then switch back to its previous level. The whole experience lasted maybe two seconds each time and was disorienting. I tried to take note of what might have triggered it, but couldn’t find a consistent situation that would cause it to happen. In general, whenever the adaptive ANC makes a change to the intensity, it’s sudden instead of the more gradual change that my Apple AirPods Pro 3 or Sony WF-1000XM6 do — for hundreds of dollars more.

The one issue I was able to figure out, also about volume attenuation, was with my call quality. While talking to a friend I regularly call when testing earbuds, if I was just listening to him, he couldn’t hear anything from my side at all. No traffic, no wind, no breathing, nothing. At one point he wondered aloud if the call had disconnected.

When I was talking, I sounded clear and natural to him if I started talking when there wasn’t a lot of ambient noise around me. When the sound around me got louder — such as more cars driving by — a bit of that sound leaked through, although my voice still sounded natural. But if I started talking while there was a lot of noise around me, my voice sounded dark as the earbuds strongly filtered out upper-mid and high frequencies, including doing a great job tamping down the loud ambient sound.

Both the ANC and call quality issues could be addressed with future firmware updates (my testing was with firmware 1.0.1.59), and if you use one of the static ANC settings instead of adaptive ANC, or don’t plan on making calls in noisy areas, then they’re a nonissue anyway.

The Nothing Ear 3A also include 32MB of on-device storage, allowing them to record up to two hours of a call or take an audio snapshot (Nothing’s term) of up to one minute. When you then access the app, you can transfer the recordings onto your device. When beginning a call recording, a message plays to notify everyone. I can easily see the use of recording an important call to make sure you don’t miss any information (although this can also easily be done through your phone), but I have yet to find a reason for the audio snapshot. It only records up to a minute of what you’re listening to, not anything around you using the earbuds’ microphones, at lower fidelity. It’s unique to the Nothing 3A, but also gimmicky.

I’m glad the Nothing Ear 3A returned to a price under $100 after the $179 Ear 3. Nothing is at its best when it’s challenging what can be done for less — and I’m more forgiving of its minor flaws. While the sound wasn’t my taste out of the box, the fact you can make meaningful adjustments and tune it to your preferences makes them more versatile than most earbuds at the same price.

Photography by John Higgins / The Verge