The headphones that listen to your ears

GADGET OF THE WEEK

Audeara A-01 £299★★★★★

IT’S usually around the point where I’m choosing a password and entering my year of birth that I feel nostalgic for the days when headphones were something you just plugged in and switched on.

These days, the average wireless cans come with six or seven buttons, an app, mysterious multi-coloured blinking lights and the sort of soothing robot voice that in sci-fi films is usually a dead giveaway that a computer is about to turn evil and start killing people.

But at least we got rid of those annoying wires, right?

Audeara’s headphones have more of an excuse than most: designed by Australian doctors, the Bluetooth over-ears actually give you a hearing test before you start, and fine-tune the music to what you can (and can’t) hear.

They’re not messing about: you have to slog through between five and 30 minutes of listening to bleeps, marking when they become ‘barely audible’, before you can turn on the built-in sound processing (which works with everything from radio apps to Spotify). For me at least, the difference was quite subtle: music sounds a bit tauter, and treble a shade sharper. It wasn’t, to be honest, a eureka moment, but I found that I could keep the volume a bit lower. These could be worth investigating if you find normal headphones don’t deliver.

Like most high-tech headphones, they’re pricey, though. They offer fairly decent noisecancelling, but £300 puts you into the fancy, boy-racer bracket in headphones, and these feel cheap next to the Boses of this world.