Creative Aurvana Air earphones

These trendy ear-bud headphones have award-winning design and good sound quality.

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The Creative Aurvana Air is a fashionable ear-bud style headphone set that has lively and detailed sound quality. The ‘Flexnium’ over-the-ear design may annoy users looking for simple fitting, but the adjustability allows for long-term comfort. With a $300 price tag they’re up against the benchmark competition of the Ultimate Ears Super.Fi 5vi and Bose In-Ear headphones — it comes down to a question of style versus substance.

Pros

  • Attractive design for over-the-ear ear-buds, detailed and lively sound

Cons

  • Expensive, takes some effort to insert into the ear

Bottom Line

The Creative Aurvana Air ear-buds are well designed and brilliantly constructed. Their detailed, rich sound is an unexpected bonus, but their high price tag places them squarely in competition with some worthy competitors.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 299.95 (AUD)

As a winner of the (apparently) prestigious Red Dot design award in Germany, the Creative Aurvana Air earphones have had a lot of attention paid to their design execution. Smooth rounded metal surfaces and thin over-the-ear hooks combine with hinged ear-buds to create a set of headphones that are, in their own way, quite special to behold. Sure, they don’t have the chunky, solid presence of a pair of high-end headphones — for example the Sennheiser HD 800 behemoths — but examining each ear-bud closely shows a device with significant thought behind it.

We have to admit, we didn’t make much use of the bendy capabilities of the vaunted Flexnium ear-hooks — the ear-buds are light enough that they can happily sit in your ear canals without weighing them down and causing fatigue. The ear-hooks do help with making the ear-buds feel more secure though, and the nifty hinge that connects the ear-buds helps in the process of putting them on. All up, the over-the-ear design is a mixed bag — you’ll spend longer inserting the ear-buds than if you used a simpler in-ear design but the trade-off is slightly better insurance against accidental cord pulling.

The Creative Aurvana Air earphones are sold packaged in an avant-garde clear plastic case, but you’ll be more likely to use the soft leather carry-case and cord organiser in day-to-day use. Both of these boxes are great additions that only serve to make the Aurvana Air a more attractive purchase.

The most important aspect of any pair of headphones is undoubtedly sound quality — and the Aurvana Air earphones won’t let you down. They don’t offer the isolation of a set of high-end canalphones, but lively sound is still attainable if you’re in a quiet environment.

Treble is well represented with sweet singing tones that are full of detail — you’ll hear every shift in pitch and timbre in vocals and brass music. Equally detailed is the mid-range set of frequencies, which sound spacious and very natural.

Bass is not as well handled due to the open design. Canalphones are far more appropriate for bass-heads thanks to their sealed nature — it’s far easier to produce quantifiable low frequency sound in a controlled environment. That said, what bass the Creative Aurvana Air earphones does produce is accurate and tight, with very little decay. The overall sound of the headphones is bright and lively — well suited to the funk and jazz music we tested them with.

If you can justify spending $300 on earphones that require effort to put in and don’t block out background noise, you’ll begin to understand the market that Creative is aiming for. Great sound reproduction, good long-term comfort and a great-looking design are the hallmarks of Creative’s Aurvana Air earphones.

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