Nutz Pro review

The Nutz Pro headphones sit somewhere between fashion headphones and high quality hi-fi or home studio headphones in price and marketing. In practice, these over-ear headphones definitely lean more towards fashion.

The headphones have a broad frequency response but are bass heavy. This isn’t necessarily a problem if you enjoy bass-heavy music, but the treble and midrange are often badly lost in the resulting mix. Even music with lots of bass isn’t always all it could be. The pounding drums of Ice-T and Slayer’s Disorder are dull and thudding, without the precise slap of skins audible through Sony’s MDR-10RC headphones. The guitars were a fuzzy mess, something typical of the Nutz Pro’s mid-range sound reproduction.

The Nutz Pros have a slightly boxy sound that meant there wasn’t as much space as we expected to hear between vocals and brass in Public Enemy’s Harder Than You Think. The synthesized beats of vocal trance and happy hardcore fared better, but only if we kept the volume up. At lower volumes, the bass overwhelmed the treble beats and mid-range vocals in Bang!’s Shooting Star. Listening at volume can damage your ears and be tiring over long periods, but the sound is undeniably fun for electronic dance music.

Thanks to their very light weight, the Nutz Pro headphones are remarkably comfortable, despite their large size. They also felt very secure on our head. The closed drivers of the Nutz Pro headphones don’t leak and provide great sound isolation, so no one will glare at you when using them on the bus or train. Unfortunately, the Nutz Pro’s glossy plastic finish and headband expander look and feel cheap and fragile. Following an update to the product, the Nutz Pro headphones now come with an inline microphone, although the version of the cable shipped with our review sample didn’t have one.

For around £140 you can do a lot better. If you want good headphones to use on the move, the Sennheiser Momentum On-Ears are great all-rounders and a much better buy.