Price: Rs 1,499
Rating: **Specs: Over the ear design, 50mm drivers, 180-degree folding system, in-line controls, built-in mic, Bluetooth 4.2
Nu Republic is amongst the newer crop of budget headphones brand that has come up in India. One of the first offerings from them is called Starboy: an over the ear style headphone with a unique 180-degree folding system.
The first thing we liked about Starboy is that its lightweight. This is achieved mainly thanks to the all plastic body of the headphones. To compensate for its plain looks, Nu Republic has got shiny textured finish on the earcup with its logo imprinted in silver colour. The earcups have a matte finish which was another thing we loved about the headphones' look and feel. What we didn't like was the basic amount of padding on the headband - in the long run, we feel this would make the headphones uncomfortable to wear.
One of the unique design elements of these headphones is the 180-degree folding system of the earcups. Instead of the typical folding in style for storage, Starboy lets you rotate the earcups upwards for storage - the rotating hinge feels sturdy, so you don't have to worry about it getting loose. In our opinion, this style is much better than the earcup folding in mechanism. The left earcup has the power button and volume buttons which gave good tactiles feedback, but we found these to be of flimsy quality. A good thing is that you get an aux-out port (cable provided in box) to use the headphones in wired mode when battery runs out.
We used the headphones for 2 weeks and found them to be comfortable to wear for long durations. The over the ear design also delivers a basic amount of passive noise cancellation. Coming to the audio quality, the volume level is shockingly high - we did not need to go beyond 70% volume level anytime during our usage. We used the headphones with a Redmi Note 7S for audio, video as well as gaming and it impressed on all genres. It delivered a good amount of bass without overpowering the treble or vocals even at high volume. However, we did feel that it tends to muddle out the high-range frequencies at max volume which means you might feel the vocals hurting your ear at anything above 80% volume level.
Battery life is a respectable 7 hours - not the best we have seen but at this price
we won't complain either. It also has rapid charge support - 10 minutes of charge gives you 40 minutes of battery life. Otherwise, the battery took around 2.5 hours for a full charge. The built-in microphone is not up the mark - we had to speak loudly on a voice call to be heard.
At the time of writing, Nu Republic's Starboy was available for as low as Rs 999 which makes it a fantastic deal. Otherwise, at Rs 1,499, you can also consider the Leaf Bass 2 which gives up to 15 hours battery life.
