I’m struggling to come up with a single bit of technology I was more excited about at CES than the Nuraloop. I reviewed Nura’s original product fairly positively, but I’ve never really be an over-ear headphone person. The company’s latest strips a lot of the unnecessary bits from those original Nuraphones, into a far more portable package.

All Nura had back at CES was a dummy prototype of the product, but it was enough to get me excited about the things. Four months later, the headphones are up for pre-order, with an expected delivery date of September. At this stage, the company appears to be gauging interest in the product, offering up early preorders for 30 percent off their $199 final retail price.

The strategy makes sense for a company that still seems to have limited retail reach. Nuraphones were a definite Kickstarter success story, raising $1.8 million. This is a way of gauging that sort of interest without having to return to the crowdfunding well.

If all of the company’s claims hold up, these are looking pretty great. The headphones maintain the same sort of custom sound profiling that made their predecessors great, while stripping away nice but unnecessary elements like the over-ear bass bump. The company’s also promised an extremely impressive 14 hours of playback on a charge — that’s even more than the set OnePlus announced today.

We should be getting out hands on production units prior to ship date, so we’ll happily report back on that end. At $140/199, they’re priced similarly to AirPods. Obviously they’re destined to be much more of a niche device than Apple’s offering, but could be right in the sweet spot for users looking for portability without sacrificing sound quality.