Nothing Headphone (1) Pro adds an xMEMS tweeter for £349

Nothing has put its most ambitious pair of headphones on sale in the UK at £349, and the pitch is unusually specific for a category that generally sells on looks and brand loyalty. The Headphone (1) Pro runs three separate drivers in each ear cup: a 40mm dynamic driver for bass, a 13 × 8mm precision dynamic driver for the midrange, and a solid-state xMEMS tweeter for treble.

Three drivers in one ear cup

Splitting the frequency range across dedicated drivers is how serious in-ear monitors have worked for years, and the xMEMS part is the interesting ingredient. Rather than a moving coil, it uses a silicon diaphragm that Nothing says is 95 times stiffer than plastic, which should produce faster transients: the crack of a snare or the breath around a consonant. The quoted frequency response runs from 20Hz to 40,000Hz.

Playback figures depend heavily on codec and noise cancellation. Nothing claims up to 68 hours with ANC off over AAC, dropping to 30 hours with cancellation active, or 53 and 28 hours respectively on LDAC. Five minutes on a USB-C cable is quoted as good for four hours of listening with ANC off, and two hours with it on.

Ten microphones and a wired escape hatch

The cancellation system uses ten microphones in total, arranged as five per side in a hybrid array, and Nothing quotes up to 46dB of adaptive depth. That figure is the theoretical ceiling rather than a promise about a busy train carriage. Transparency mode, a four-microphone call algorithm, Bluetooth 6.1, dual connection, Google Fast Pair and Microsoft Swift Pair all appear on the spec sheet alongside AAC, SBC, LDAC and LC3 for broadcast audio.

Wired listening gets proper attention. The USB-C input accepts up to 24-bit/192kHz audio and the 3.5mm jack up to 24-bit/96kHz, and the headphones carry an IP52 rating for dust and water resistance. The whole assembly weighs 327g, the hardshell case adds a strap loop, and both a 3.5mm and a USB-C cable ship in the box.

Nothing also published a third-party verified carbon footprint of 18.3 kg CO2e, says the packaging is 99 per cent plastic-free and that final assembly runs on renewable energy. Tuning was carried out with Metropolis Studios in London, including a Dynamic Spatial Audio mode modelled on the studio's own control room and head-tracked spatial audio more generally.

Our opinion

The story here is not the tweeter, it is the trajectory. Nothing spent its early years selling transparent plastic and dot-matrix hype, and a three-way driver stack with a solid-state tweeter is the kind of engineering decision that only pays off if the tuning is disciplined. Anyone can bolt drivers into a shell; the reason multi-driver designs earn their price is crossover work, and Nothing is leaning hard on the fact that Metropolis Studios signed off on the result. That is a much less photogenic selling point than a see-through case, and it suggests the company has grown up.

The published carbon figure is quietly the most competitive thing in the spec sheet. Very few audio brands publish a third-party verified footprint at all, and 18.3 kg CO2e gives buyers something to compare rather than a vague promise about sustainability. Against that, xMEMS tweeters have appeared in flagship earbuds before without changing how anyone listens, and a theoretical 46dB of cancellation says nothing until it is measured in a carriage full of commuters. At £349 these sit in the awkward middle: more expensive than the value favourites, cheaper than the established flagships. The wired inputs are what would tip it for anyone still plugging headphones into a desktop interface, and that is a shrinking but stubbornly loyal audience worth selling to.