Noise Cancelling Headphones

[skryingbreath]

Do they seriously work? What's a good brand?

[rockouthippie]

Yeah, they work, but are really most effective with engine and motor sounds.

Bose invented the thing, and Bose makes the best ones.

[gaekwad2]

Sort of, though the only real advantage over regular closed phones is that noise canceling works fairly well against low frequencies.
The biggest downside is that none of them sound particularly great.

Bose is only good at advertising.

[rockouthippie]

The ones I've used did pretty well into the midrange too... like jet engines... The key to the canceling effect is how well the circuitry can create the anti-sound... Complex sounds are harder to predict and therefore less canceled. The attempt at trying to cancel complex sounds can create some kind of weird distortions.

I've tried Sennheiser and Bose ones. The Sennheiser ones sounded better in quiet, but the Bose ones were better at noise canceling.

[gaekwad2]

There's no prediction going on, just a microphone signal that gets amplified, equalized and reversed. The problem is that for it to work at all frequencies there should ideally be zero distance between mic and driver, while keeping them isolated from each other.

[skryingbreath]

Translate that to dummy talk for me. If I'm in a room with a window open to an extremely busy street, will I hear most of the traffic?

[gaekwad2]

With regular closed phones the traffic noise will be muffled but you'll still hear a low rumble. Active noise canceling on the other hand is most effective against that rumble so you'll get a reduction at all frequencies, unless, like some models, they're built so lightly that in fact overall isolation is weaker than with heavier regular closed phones (not to mention IEMs).

The problems are for one those weird distortions (that reportedly can even cause nausea for some people), then often some level of hiss (which obviously will only be audible in quiet surroundings, and in that case you could switch the canceling off, unless...), battery consumption, and some models won't work without canceling at all and will shut down if the battery dies.

tl;dr: They isolate better than conventional phones of similar size and weight, especially against rumble, but there are alternatives (IEMs, big closed studio phones) that'll sound better and work more or less equally well for blocking noise.

[rockouthippie]

Originally posted by skryingbreath
Translate that to dummy talk for me. If I'm in a room with a window open to an extremely busy street, will I hear most of the traffic?

HMMMMM!, WHOOSH!, SCHREECH and HONK! will be greatly reduced. CLANG and BANG... not so much...

I've heard of the hiss thing, but never experienced it.

Ideally, a guy could stick his head in a bucket with 20 lbs of fiberglass insulation and cut eye and air holes, but that's not convenient. The effect was that I could sit on a packed airplane and listen to classical music with silent passages at a fairly low volume and not get irritated by the noise.

[ryan]

I got some six dollar earbuds at family dollar that work pretty good for six dollars. Plus they're the only earbuds I've ever used that don't hurt my ears.

They claim to be noise canceling but its just different size rubber fittings that plug your ear. It works well enough for me though, and they sound good enough. They block out a lot of noise too. I can listen to them outside at work by the highway and I don't hear the traffic (Depending on how loud I have it playing).

[watadoo]

Bose is only good at advertising.>>> back when I was in the recording studio business, we used to say about Bose: "better audio through marketing."

[rockouthippie]

I always thought Bose stuff was ok. On the other hand, there is usually something better for the same money.

[watadoo]

Bose isn't bad, but it's not pro quality and not exactly the miracle their marketing makes it out to be.

[skryingbreath]

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I don't care about studio quality, just something to make things less noisy while not hurting my eardrums.

[swingdjted]

It looks like ass, but I use in-ear modules with Stihl ear muffs (similar to the black ones on the bottom right of picture, but a NPR of 27). They're good enough that I can eliminate most of the sound of a chainsaw, table saw, mower, weed whacker, etc. which is especially helpful in that I don't have to turn up the music very loud. Even blasts from a 12 gauge shotgun are reduced to the sound of a textbook that was dropped from the height of a pencil. They're extremely comfortable too, even if I wear them 10 hours straight (with a lunch break of course). In a plane, engines and pissed-off babies completely disappear even with very low passages of the music. In my humble opinion, no "headphones" can come close to this, and yet this combination costs only a fraction of the price of the Bose stuff. Furthermore, Renee's brother has "quiet comfort 3" Bose models, and they don't do nearly as good a job if you ask me.

If the ones I have aren't good enough, there are even better ones out there, without going up much in price.

[watadoo]

I still have a pair of runway noise killers that my bro-in-law a mechanic for United Air in SF gave to me. Great for wearing while chainsawing things or zoning out on the front porch.