Nuraphone Gaming Mic Kit Review: Personalized audio for the battlefield [Video]

One of the most unique pairs of Bluetooth headphones just got an upgrade with the new Nuraphone Gaming Mic attachment. Nuraphone itself offers personalized audio for music, but it can now take that personal audio to the battlefield as a proper gaming headset with its new sleek microphone attachment. Head below to watch the video and hear how it sounds. 

Nuraphone Overview

If you aren’t familiar with Nuraphone, it’s a pretty interesting bit of technology. In coordination with the Nura app, it can provide a personalized sound tailored to how you hear music. Beyond just the app side, though, it has a unique approach with both in-ear and over-ear drivers.

In-ear drivers play most of the audio and crisp, clear highs while the over-ear drivers provide low frequencies that you can feel for a more immersive sound experience. It’s an interesting experience to have both in and over-ears on the same headphones, but in use, they provide a fun and immersive sound. 

With passive noise isolation thanks to the in- and over-ear design and active noise cancellation, the Nuraphone is great for knocking out background noise. When being used in Bluetooth mode, it is also easy to switch to an ambient noise mode called “social mode” to hear the environment and people around you when needed.

Personalized Sound

Once connected to a phone, the Nura app will lead you through an initialization process that will test your hearing and come up with a specialized profile for you. Here’s a bit about how it works from their website:

“The nuraphone plays a range of tones into the ear, and then measures a very faint sound that your ear generates in response to these tones called the Otoacoustic Emission (OAE). This tiny signal originates in the cochlea and vibrates the eardrum, turning it into a speaker and playing sound back out of your ear… The nuraphone uses an extremely sensitive microphone to detect this returning sound wave, and a self-learning engine built into the nuraphone to create your profile…. Once the nuraphone has created your hearing profile it sonically shapes your music so that it matches your hearing system and delivers all the detail of the music you love.”

Nuraphone Gaming Mic: How’s the comfort?

With dedicated in-ear drivers, comfort will vary by user. Nuraphone includes a couple of different sizes of eartips. When you put the headphones on, they kind of move around within the earcup to fit securely inside the ear. I never had any trouble getting a good fit and seal, but personally, I did find the Nuraphone headphones a bit more fatiguing over time than normal in-ear monitors or earbuds. 

Simple, secure setup

Getting the microphone set up is simple, and just like the rest of the headphones, it is a very well-designed attachment. The microphone sits in line with the connector that attaches to the headphones, and it feels secure in its own right, but they’ve also included a clip that holds it even tighter on the Nuraphone. Just clip it over the metal housing and then slide it over the connector to make sure that it won’t loosen when gaming. 

Nuraphone Gaming Mic: How does it sound? 

In use, the Nuraphone Gaming Microphone sounds great. It is still a bit thin compared to a larger USB microphone like the QuadCast line from HyperX, but that’s to be expected from gaming microphones. They typically cater to clear voices and clear comms rather than a deep, full-sounding voice. 

Loss of Control

One bummer with the Nupraphone Gaming Mic, though, is that when a cable is plugged into the headphones, you lose the tap controls. While not a huge deal, it would have been nice to have a way to control social mode or ambient sound mode on the headphones so that you could interact with people in the room without taking the headset off. 

Nuraphone will stay set the same way it was when connected to a mobile device, though. So if you have social mode enabled, that will carry over to when it is connected via cable — you just aren’t able to disable it without connecting back to a device via Bluetooth.

Wrapping up

Overall, if you’re a fan of Nuraphone, and you’re a gamer, the Nuraphone gaming mic is a must-have in my opinion. It takes the unique features of the headphones and adds a great sounding mic that attaches securely to the headphones. At $399, it carries a premium compared to other dedicated gaming headsets, but for those who game, love tech, and want a great sounding pair of headphones on the go, these check a lot of boxes. 

Buy Nuraphone Gaming Mic bundle

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