Review: NHT SuperBuds

Liana Bandziulis

When shopping for headphones, you’ll find no shortage of models promising bigger, badder bass than the next guy. That’s the trend, and it’s understandable—tight, powerful bass gives whatever you’re listening to more physical presence. Besides, who wants a kick drum that doesn’t wallop? But too often with these headphones, the rest of the audio spectrum suffers. So you get beats that have plenty of booty, but little finesse. Your cymbals are flabby and your guitars sound like mush.

Not so with these NHT

SuperBuds. The $100 in-ear monitors from the relatively small Northern California company are huge on the low end, but still conjure up sweet tones through the whole audio spectrum. The company sent me a pair to audition, and while I found them a bit too bass-heavy for acoustic jazz and voice-forward recordings like podcasts, they were great for electronic music, vintage rock and soul, and all the modern loud stuff. These buds have gobs of bass on offer, and any music that takes advantage of some low-end flexibility will sound fantastic. Like reggae—oh my, the reggae. Maybe that explains the giant glowing pot leaf on the retail box?

NHT (Now Hear This) is a small outfit with a long history of making quality audio products. It started out designing hi-fi stereo speakers in the late 1980s and soon added home theater, PC audio, and surround-sound systems to its line-up. The engineers have won several awards for driver design over the years, and the company’s co-founder has even spun up a guitar amplifier business. So the NHT crew knows a few tricks with regards to making great-sounding speakers for different applications.

The SuperBuds, strangely enough, are NHT’s first foray into earphones. The same no-frills design philosophy the company puts into its loudspeakers is on display here. There are no flashes of color, no oddly shaped enclosures. Just simple aluminum cylinders with black cables. And while that makes for some super-solid construction, the result is a pair of shells that are damn heavy. They don’t feel too heavy when they’re in your ears, and they don’t fall out easily, but be warned that they are heftier than you’re probably used to.

The woven fabric cable sheaths are supposed to be non-tangling, but that’s not exactly the case. In my month of testing, I often had to untangle them before I could put them in, even though I kept them carefully coiled inside the hard-shell travel pouch.

But those are minor quibbles. What matters most is the sound, and with multiple tips in the box—including five latex tips and two pairs of Comply foam tips—it’s easy to find a seal that works for you. In fact, you can “tune” the earphones just by swapping tips. Going to a smaller tip, and thus a looser seal, lightens the lows considerably. Put the Comply tips on there and seal your ear canal completely, and you get that tidal wave of boom, plus the brighter details get a little crisper. Of course, this is true of just about any in-ears with interchangeable tips, but I found that swapping tips altered the NHT’s sound profile more so than it did on other in-ears I’ve tested.

Another way to tune the NHTs is through an equalizer app, and the company includes free coupon codes in the SuperBuds’ booklet for EQu (iOS) and Equalizer Pro (Android). I was always doing a little tweaking here and there depending on what I was listening to.

Still, no amount of EQing is going to change the character of these bass-heavy buds. They are big and brash and they take no shit. But if that’s how you like your music, you’ve met your match.