The evolution of the boombox
Shoulders ready, up she goes: BlueAnt’s big Burleigh Bluetooth speaker is ready to make a statement.
In times gone by, young gentlemen didn’t go the gym; they developed their biceps (and often back-strain) by carrying ridiculously-heavy semi-portable sound systems around on their shoulders, audibly assaulting the neighbourhood with the blasting forth of their carefully-curated mix-tapes.
Today we have Bluetooth speakers and Spotify for that purpose, but most of the many popular portable speakers today are so small you could put them in a pocket, subject to unsightly bulging. No shoulder-hefted bragging rights there.
Australian company BlueAnt is bringing back the bulk with this Burleigh (burly, geddit??) speaker, which puts the usual black grilled and rubbery design of a Bluetooth speaker on steroids. It is not quite as large as the image below implies, but nevertheless a significant load at 2.1kg from its hip-banging 30cm length and 14cm diameter. It comes with a carry-strap and claims to be IP54 splashproof — which means protected against dust but not fully dustproof, and splashproof but not hose or immersion-proof. It makes a promise of 20 hours playback time from its battery fullycharged using the supplied micro-USB cable.
While the Burleigh is assembled in China, it’s designed in Australia and BlueAnt is Australian-owned. And while the Burleigh uses a manly American voice to announce things like ‘Bluetooth’ and ‘Connected’, pleasingly the sound made power up is a snatch of bass-laden Aussie didgeridoo. It connects like any other Bluetooth speaker and is ready to play in mere moments.
And many users may simply let it play, since out of the box it delivers a highly enjoyable and almost frighteningly powerful presentation across a wide range of music. Much of this is down to its simple good design, fitting in twin 35mm tweeters and 76mm mid/bass drivers into its tubular construction, along with two passive radiators to enhance the bass. It also lays claim to “Advanced Grammy Award winning DSP software” (no further information provided, but we would guess this means MAXXAudio DSP from Waves
Audio). And in a desktop scenario, it reached a significantly pumping level after advancing only five of the available 16 volume steps on our iPhone’s volume control, leaving a massive amount of headroom for special occasions, be that party dancing indoors or heading out to noise-pollute your local beaches and parks while suitably socially distancing.
While you’re likely to use your phone to control the Burleigh, its own controls are nicely separated into two sections, the basic play/pause and volume controls nice and large and rubbery on the top, while on the right side is the power button surrounded by four other buttons. These bring some useful and unexpected versatility. Left and right are skip buttons, while the bottom button shuttles through ‘standard’, ‘bass boost’ and, interestingly, ‘movies’, each one announced in turn by the manly American bloke. The top button is an input selector which toggles between the three input options of Bluetooth, auxiliary input (the American voice doesn’t pronounce the second ‘i’ in ‘auxiliary as you make the change), and playback from the unexpected microSD card slot hidden under the removable side panel, from which MP3, WMA, APE, FLAC and WAV files can be played. Mind you, navigation of these files is limited to the play/pause and next track
buttonry. File playback from a card or stick really needs an app, but there’s none here since there’s no Wi-Fi, no networking, so no additional streaming either: Spotify Connect, Chromecast, Apple AirPlay, none of that.
Still there’s convenience and longterm reliability in sticking with cabled or Bluetooth playback from your smart device, able to use your usual preferred music apps and enjoying them made large by the burly Burleigh. It produced a far more substantial and expansive sound than the Bose Portable Smart Speaker, for example, its bass more defined, though its midrange boxier and able to congest and get raucous with something banging like The Strypes’ Mystery Man, which the smoother Bose handled with rather more grace under pressure. Play kd lang, however, and the benefits of Bose’s warmer midrange are trounced by the Burleigh’s presence, size and the detail it adds to her vocal nuances. Blast out Tyler, The Creator’s Earfquake and neither Bose nor BlueAnt could handle the vast bass notes over the verses, but the Burleigh pushed such hip-hop sounds louder and further. The BlueAnt definitely delivers its best balance given a bit of distance and room effect, though it cares not at all whether you use its mains cable or leave it playing on its charge.
Conclusion
For our taste the Burleigh is both bulky and heavy for actually carrying around; we’d keep its portability for moving around the house, to the barbecue, or taking on car trips. But then we never hoisted sound systems to shoulder height in the old days either. Its sound certainly gets a tick from us at the price (which seems quite variable, so shop around), and if it’s sheer value of size you’re after, the big black Burleigh is pretty much without compare.
For true wireless noise-cancelling models, the ATH-ANC300TW earbuds manage to be impressively compact, sporting little more than the audio-technica logo and embossed circles in the way of markings, their moderate size and rounded interior helping them sit comfortably and securely in the ear. Four sizes of silicon tips and a pair of Comply Foam eartips assist further in achieving comfort, as does the positioning of buttons on each bud on their top (when in the ear) so you won’t be pressing the units further into your canals when trying to activate any commands. More customisation of the buttons, would, however, be useful. By default, the right button handles playback transport controls while the left manages noise-cancelling and volume — flipping this orientation is the only variable option at the time of writing.
Speaking of noise-cancelling, it’s excellent, as good as we’ve heard short of Sony’s similarly-priced WF-1000XM3, the obvious competitor here, and which this pair only narrowly falls behind, though we did notice it suffered more than its rivals in windy conditions. You can switch between noise-cancelling or social ‘Hear-Through’ mode on the buds themselves, but you’ll need audio-technica’s Connect app to simply turn-off ANC or alter its intensity between ‘Airplane’, ‘On The Go’, or ‘Office/ Study’. The latter two worked remarkably well; sadly we’ve been a bit short on airplane travel lately in order to test the first.
Impressively, the ATH-ANC300TW are somewhat rugged, with a rating of IPX2 against “dripping water such as rain and sweat”, which makes them more viable as workout and everyday buds than some.
Battery life is middling — 4.5 hours alone is OK given their size and the inclusion of ANC, but the charging case only has an extra 13.5 hours; some offer much more. Perhaps the most notably different aspect of the ATH-ANC300TW is their sound signature. While many, including Sony, opt for a bass-forward sound, audiotechnica has gone for a flatter, more neutral frequency response more keeping with its ‘studio’ reputation. For music lovers who have adjusted to thumpier sound, this may come across as underwhelming, but it will suit a greater variety of genres, and the overall clarity and sense of space produced by the buds is impressive. Note that the app, otherwise well stocked, lacks an EQ section to tweak the frequency response to taste if you do find the ANC300TW’s bass to be an issue.
The ATH-ANC300TW offers top-notch noise-cancelling and brilliant audio quality in a compact form factor. Sony’s flagship is the obvious competition, but if you’re seeking a less bass-heavy option or something a little more suited to exercising, you won’t be disappointed here. HD
Melbourne-based audio company Nura has set loose their second product on the world, carrying forward the torch first lit by the over-ear ‘Nuraphone’ in 2017, and greeted with praise in our main headphone round-up last year. And that was unusual, since Nura was one of several companies which sprang up almost simultanously to offer hearing-adaptive features — they give you a hearing test, and then adjust the headphones accordingly to deliver what you didn’t know you were missing. Few of these have we rated as more than glorified EQ. Nura’s original nuraphone seemed an exception.
Promising many of the same features as its larger sibling, the new NuraLoop offers up personalised audio in a more compact, rugged, portable and affordable package, while making barely any sacrifices in the process.
Design
As with the Nuraphone, these in-ears are only available in a single colour, but the uniform black design is elegant and stylish enough to make up for this lack of choice.
When worn, the only markings visible are the pair of white Nura logos on each earbud and, for the eagle-eyed, the word ‘nura’ on the connector that sits at the back of the neck. Construction is predominantly plastic with certain components having a similar rubberised, silicone feel to elements of the nuraphone. The ear hooks are malleable but somewhat rigid, so you can bend them to better secure their fit over your ears.
While these hooks are somewhat adjustable, the length of cable behind your neck isn’t. For the most part, this will be fine and make for a tidy aesthetic, though we found it could bump against collars and hoods of bulkier clothing, occasionally even dislodging the seal of the NuraLoop’s in-ear fit.
As for the earbuds themselves, their housings are definitely on the large and heavy side compared with much of the competition (even some true wireless buds which lack the cable linking the two units). But we didn’t find this uncomfortable during extended listening sessions — and when you consider the tech within them, it’s easy to forgive.
Features
While not immersible, the NuraLoop is rated at IPX3, so it’ll survive inclement weather and is a good companion when sweating up. It ships with a nifty neoprene case which is nice and compact, although it gets a bit tight if you try packing in both the cables along with the unit itself.
The cables in question allow you to connect to a USB port for topping up the impressive 16-hour battery, or a 3.5mm headphone port if you’d like to use your NuraLoop plugged in. These both attach magnetically via a proprietary connection in the centre of the neckband, the headphone cable running down your back. While certainly not typical for consumer headphones, this design is standard for musicians using in-ear monitors when performing live (a market to which Nura also caters). Considering how rare is the ability to run a cable to wireless in-ears at all, no complaints here.
The NuraLoop’s user interface consists of two large capacitive buttons that you either tap or ‘dial’ up or down. We found ourselves accidentally activating these when adjusting the fit of the buds fairly
often, but more on this later. For the dialling method you circle your finger around the edge of the button to turn up/down certain features such as volume or ANC.
We found ourselves rarely using these dials given their lack of precision; a more useful implementation here might be for skipping tracks forward and back. With the Nuraphone, customer feedback saw various changes being made via firmware update, and we gather that the company will be taking the same ongoing development approach with the NuraLoop. With that in mind, minor gripes about the UI are unlikely to be longlasting — there’s already talk of a ‘safe mode’ to disable the capacitive buttons against the accidental activation we experienced — useful during a workout session, for instance.
Performance
Before even listening to your NuraLoop, you’ll need to download and set up the app, and invoke the flagship trick of creating your adaptive-hearing profiles. Take a look at Nura’s website for a moderately detailed explanation of this, but it’s not, like most rivals, simply a “can you hear this?” test of multiple tones. Rather than you listening to the NuraLoop, the NuraLoop will listen to you instead, aiming to detect ‘otoacoustic emissions’ — tiny signals originating in the cochlea in response to a sound. When these then vibrate your ear drum (at around one ten-thousandth of the level of the sound which went in) Nura claims to use an extremely sensitive microphone to detect this returning sound-wave, then analysing it to identify anomalies in your cochlear’s response, then adjusting the sound of your NuraLoop accordingly. Creating a profile takes a minute or two, and it’s completely automatic. Once you’ve made it, depending on the quality of your hearing you’ll likely be able to hear a striking difference between standard and adapted audio.
The hearing profile you create here is distinct from that created if you own the Nuraphone, so you can’t share them across devices. This is due to the fact that entirely new drivers and processors are used for the NuraLoop, but similar results are achieved.
‘Immersion’ mode makes a return, allowing you to select a varying degree of enhanced bass impact with your music, and while it isn’t quite as powerful as the version found in the over-ear counterparts, the NuraLoop’s 8.6mm drivers are plenty capable of delivering on this front.
Similarly, the active noisecancelling and social mode are present in this device as well.
The ANC isn’t quite up to competing with Sony and its intelligent cancelling, but it’s still one of the better applications we’ve come across and performed admirably in office, street and home environments.
Conclusion
We gave the $499 Nuraphone a good review for its sonic performance, and that was before
Nura introduced the firmware update that added active noisecancelling and social modes. As an earbud design, we reckon the $299 NuraLoop scores still higher for its delivered sound.
As with every in-ear product, there are elements that won’t ‘gel’ with everyone — the bulkier housings of the buds might not suit every ear, and the non-adjustable neckband could turn some away. But these complaints are certainly minor in the scheme of NuraLoop’s manifold successes.
For those who find the units comfortable (the majority, we suspect), they’ll be greeted with beautiful tailored sound in a compact package that boasts solid battery life, useful noise-cancelling, weatherproofing and highly enjoyable music, all for a very reasonable price. Harry Domanski