Nuheara IQ Max2 Buds

 

A couple of years ago my hearing wasn't fairing so well and my audiologist insisted I was close to needing hearing aids, ignoring my insistence that at the time I was getting over an ear infection (and I was).

I do however have some issues with my hearing - tinnitus being a big one and I can find a lot of people talking at once to be quite overwhelming and starts to overload my brain. 

I discovered Nuheara IQ Buds. An Australian company no less, based in WA. A heap of awards, and a product that could do hearing profiles on each ear and had some interesting features for allowing you to control how you hear, including active noise cancellation and various profiles that aid in hearing better in different environments. 

They're not cheap - mine were around $400. 

https://www.nuheara.com/usa/products/iqbuds-max/ 

 

I found them to be excellent at noise cancellation. I spend a bit of time working in data centres where there is a lot of loud fan noise and some of these environments are negative pressure. They handled this well, and I could use them for listening to music. 

My first set however were replaced in 4 months. I started getting a whilsting noise through them - something that could also happen when the fit was compromised, but mine was not. It was quite horrendous.

I had no major drama getting them replaced.

This week, I needed to put a few hours in a data centre and really needed them to cut out the noise and give me some background music to help distract from the drone of the gear I was working in proximity to. They didn't work. The charge case was charged, but they were not responding. 

Luckily I nearly always have a set of ear plugs around my neck. Good backup plan. 

I've wound up, after now 9 months of ownership, asking Nuheara for a refund. Their product, whilst has great noise cancellation, good app features and great sound quality, is quite simply not reliable enough. For something that was a lot more expensive than other products on the market, my expectation was that it would work when I needed it to. I've never returned a product twice in my life. 

At the end of the day, the product did what it said it would very well - when it worked. What I did find though is that I didn't use a lot of its "features". The sound profiles rarely did much for me beyond having one selected when I needed to hear if someone could talk to me. 

Some people had suggested it helped them with their tinnitus. I found no such benefit beyond playing a masking audio... which I can play on anything, including my clockradio at night when it's really acting up.

Competitively, it's just another bluetooth headset with a charge case.  For $400, you have a lot of options. And most don't cost that much. 

I did some research and decided upon a set of Sony WF1000XM3s. They're a wireless noise cancelling in-ear for around $160. They rate really quite well for both audio quality and battery life. 

The suggestion is that they can handle around 6 hours with music plus noise cancellation going. The Nuheara product certainly doesn't last that long - usually lasting a couple of hours before needing to be returned. 

It'll be interesting to do a full comparison once the Sony ones arrive. Hopefully next week. Hopefully around the same time that Nuheara process my refund. 

Overall, pretty disappointing that a premium Australian product - that does work really well... when it works, needs to be replaced with something else just because it's not reliable.