The Nothing Ear 3A deliver great, but sometimes buggy, performance for the price

ANC performance is improved over previous Nothing earbuds, with solid cancellation particularly in the lower mids and bass range, so low drones like air conditioners or plane cabin noise get filtered out very well. For $99, they also do a decent job with higher frequencies, but if you plan to use them consistently in a coffee shop you’ll still hear orders being called out a bit. And if the high ANC setting is too much for you, there are mid and low settings that let in a bit more of the low end to ground you in reality.

There’s also an adaptive ANC setting, but here’s where some of the minor issues I encountered started. While out on walks around the neighborhood, occasionally (maybe two or three times during an hour walk) the ANC intensity would quickly adjust to let in much more ambient noise and then switch back to its previous level. The whole experience lasted maybe two seconds each time and was disorienting. I tried to take note of what might have triggered it, but couldn’t find a consistent situation that would cause it to happen. In general, whenever the adaptive ANC makes a change to the intensity, it’s sudden instead of the more gradual change that my Apple AirPods Pro 3 or Sony WF-1000XM6 do — for hundreds of dollars more.

The one issue I was able to figure out, also about volume attenuation, was with my call quality. While talking to a friend I regularly call when testing earbuds, if I was just listening to him, he couldn’t hear anything from my side at all. No traffic, no wind, no breathing, nothing. At one point he wondered aloud if the call had disconnected.

When I was talking, I sounded clear and natural to him if I started talking when there wasn’t a lot of ambient noise around me. When the sound around me got louder — such as more cars driving by — a bit of that sound leaked through, although my voice still sounded natural. But if I started talking while there was a lot of noise around me, my voice sounded dark as the earbuds strongly filtered out upper-mid and high frequencies, including doing a great job tamping down the loud ambient sound.

Both the ANC and call quality issues could be addressed with future firmware updates (my testing was with firmware 1.0.1.59), and if you use one of the static ANC settings instead of adaptive ANC, or don’t plan on making calls in noisy areas, then they’re a nonissue anyway.

The Nothing Ear 3A also include 32MB of on-device storage, allowing them to record up to two hours of a call or take an audio snapshot (Nothing’s term) of up to one minute. When you then access the app, you can transfer the recordings onto your device. When beginning a call recording, a message plays to notify everyone. I can easily see the use of recording an important call to make sure you don’t miss any information (although this can also easily be done through your phone), but I have yet to find a reason for the audio snapshot. It only records up to a minute of what you’re listening to, not anything around you using the earbuds’ microphones, at lower fidelity. It’s unique to the Nothing 3A, but also gimmicky.

I’m glad the Nothing Ear 3A returned to a price under $100 after the $179 Ear 3. Nothing is at its best when it’s challenging what can be done for less — and I’m more forgiving of its minor flaws. While the sound wasn’t my taste out of the box, the fact you can make meaningful adjustments and tune it to your preferences makes them more versatile than most earbuds at the same price.