In a unique application of medical-grade technology, the new Nura Loop headphones tap into OAE, or otoacoustic emissions, to actually learn how your individual ear hears, and adjust sound output accordingly.
This is accomplished by the brand’s proprietary “Nura Personalised Sound” technology — based on the same medical technology used to test all children’s hearing globally by monitoring otoacoustic emissions (OAE).
OAE were first documented in 1948, but it wasn’t until 1978 that we were first able to measure them, and today OAE are used in screening newborn babies for hearing.
Nura’s technology takes these techniques further to measure the relative sensitivity of your hearing across different tones. Nura Personalised Sound technology uses sensitive microphones (the same series of Knowles microphones used by NASA for the Mars2020 mission) and advanced signal processing to monitor OAEs, detecting the activity in the cochlea to understand how sensitive your hearing is to different tones.
If you’re not already familiar with Nura, the brand’s original over-ear style Nuraphone bluetooth wireless headphone was the world’s first earphone to automatically learn and adapt to your personal hearing.
To learn your hearing in about a minute, Nura plays a range of tones. These sound waves travel into the ear canal, vibrate the eardrum, which in turn vibrates three little bones that are connected to the cochlea which is responsible for converting these mechanical vibrations into electrical signals that are sent through the auditory nerve to the brain. When sound is detected by the cochlea it also sends a small vibration back out through the three little bones which vibrate the eardrum. The eardrum acts like a tiny speaker and plays sound back out of the ear that is roughly 10,000 times smaller than the sound played into the ear. Using a tiny microphone built into the nura earpiece – this signal is sensed and then analysed. By detecting the ear’s response to a variety of frequencies, the nuraphone can create a hearing profile. Once complete, this hearing profile is used to adapt the music to match the Nuraphone “sound system” to your “hearing system,” delivering perfectly balanced and clear detail.
In what could be the most innovative advancement in personal audio this year, Nura delivers a truly customized listening experience, now in the brands first in-ear wrap-around design for mobility and lower profile convenience. This is the first time this type of personalized listening experience and depth of sound, especially bass ranges, has been available in a compact earphone design for easy, on-the-go listening. It also leads the industry in battery life so it’s easier than ever to keep listening on long travel days (when we have those again), runs, rides, etc.
These in-ear headphones have accomplished a feat that every brand has been trying to unlock for more than a decade: how to get the sound quality of over-ear headphones into a compact and in-ear device. We would be more than happy to get you a sample out to test out, and let you tell us what you think.
This is also the first time in history you’re able to share and compare hearing profiles. Never been able to do that before. There’s a social component. They also feature a noise-cancelling mode you set on the app that is amazing for blocking out ambient sounds, annoying people at airports, sports on tv at the gym, and crying children.
Stay tuned here and to our Instagram channel as the brand is rumored to be releasing a gaming headset later this year.
