Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Hear how the best ANC headphones handle real world and lab tests”.
Appreciate it, oh it’s a microphone, so this is us out on the streets of New York, all sweaty with our new co-worker, the ku-100 we’re here to put a quickly evolving technology to the test, active noise cancellation or ANC. This feature is at a Crossroads. It’S come a long way and it’s about to make a very different Leap Forward, so we’re testing some of the leading headphones out here in the field and in an independent lab. We even got one of the first pairs of consumer ANC headphones to try out and thanks to our friend here, you’ll hear everything we heard. So this is your status update on noise cancellation, how far it’s come who’s doing it best and what comes next? These are the Bose, quiet, Comfort or QC ones released in 2000.
It was an early milestone in ANC and the oldest Hardware we can scrounge up on eBay. So might as well start here. Here’S what active noise cancellation means there’s a little microphone in the ear cup that picks up the sound waves headed to your ears, then an onboard circuit which is actually in this little dongle here for the QC ones. It calculates the inverse of that wave and creates a kind of anti-noise. So if this wave is the noise coming at you, the headphones, create this opposing wave and plays it through the speakers. The two cancel each other out.
The result isn’t complete silence. Here’S a graph of how much sound the qc1 can reduce the x-axis is the frequency and the y-axis is the change in the decibel level of the sound anything under this line is quieter. Anc is pretty good at muffling lower frequencies. Here around 120 hertz, like the Drone of an airplane engine, it doesn’t work as well at higher frequencies, but a well-designed ear cup can block a lot of this through passive attenuation, just plugging your ears, basically think of screeching brakes or the wine of fluorescent lights. But a lot has changed in 23 years the big players like Bose and Sony have been improving their systems and, more recently Apple has joined the party with the airpods pro and the airpods max lots of other companies like Samsung and Jabra have been competitive too. So how far has ANC come since the QC ones and who’s the champ these days? Well we’re putting a solid line up to the test, along with the QC ones.
We have Bose’s qc45s and the noise canceling 700., we’ll be comparing those with Sony’s, 1000xm5s and Apple’s airpods Max, and just because we have this pair of Thirteen hundred dollar Bose headphones that you might use if you’re a helicopter pilot. So let’s go outside I’m going to change my shirt and uh. Let’S, let’s see I don’t know, let’s get sweaty, let’s get sweaty so first meet the ku-100 dummy head microphone. Noise canceling is hard to explain by just talking about it, so we’re going to try to share with you how it sounds by putting a bunch of noise canceling headphones on the ku-100 two microphones, one in each year left and right to replicate how humans hear sound.
Here’S what the head here is by itself now for the full effect, here’s us putting on the Bose, qc45s and flipping on the ANC by the way these headphones aren’t going to be playing other sounds so you’re. Listening for how quiet it gets, adding something like music here would make that harder to discern. So here are the other headphones, but we don’t live and work in the middle of a field. Thank you come on real quick.
We did play some spoken word through the headphones with ANC and here’s. What that sounds like this is a voice recording that might sound like a podcast or an audiobook, maybe the kind of voice that might talk about mattress, ads or Kohl’s cases. You don’t just listen to music, so this is what a voice sounds like through ANC headphones out of New York. Thank you.
So, after all our tests, a few things stood out to us one shocker, is that ANC has come a long way since the QC ones. We also noticed some outliers in different scenarios like the Bose 700s were shockingly good on the subway platform. Bose’S a30 Aviation headset worked great, but not well enough to Warrant its thirteen hundred dollar price tag for a daily commute. Also, The Verge would not let me rent a helicopter to test them properly. Ultimately, our tests were fun, but a little amateurish and very subjective and sweaty. So we decided to call on the experts yeah, so my name is Jacob sonogarden and I work for a company called Head Acoustics head Acoustics is an independent lab that does all kinds of audio testing for clients, large and small, and they offer to help us out. So you sent us five headphones and asked us. Essentially. Can you please test these? The way that you would recommend your customers test them right? The latest standards the latest benchmarks, the latest solution – to see how would these stack up head Acoustics is used to testing the latest and greatest Hardware, so Jacob was actually pretty excited to play with these old QC ones for a change we handled them with silk gloves. We were afraid that if we looked at them, they might disintegrate the lab used a dummy head similar to ours, but a little more advanced, surrounded by eight speakers that reproduced a variety of sound environments with super high fidelity. We can make it sound, like you’re, standing on a street corner the street corner with traffic actually coming in front of you and to the right of you, because that’s what it was like when we did the recording on that street corner that allows us to test The products in a real world scenario head Acoustics, ran a whole battery of tests.
It tracked decibel reduction at different frequencies and weighted those measurements based on the sensitivities of the human ear. It even used algorithms to predict how a few hundred people might rate each pair of those headphones, which is wild enough. Chit Chat. What were the the results? Jacob sent us a big table showing the scores of all the headphones on all the tests. The winner of each is highlighted in green and at a glance you can see a trend. If you look down the table – and you see, there is a column of green essentially and that’s the xm5s looks like the Sony’s did pretty well here they are fantastic at active noise, cancellation and passive apms I’d, say a good second place, apms, meaning the airpods Max And the Bose is the qc45s and the 700s sort of struggle a little bit in between second third fourth spot a little bit.
Many of these graphs show how close the modern headphones are to each other in performance. There are standouts look at how good Sony’s ear cups are at just passive attenuation and as expected test after test, the qc1 struggled we’ve seen these efforts and these small incremental improvements, and you know over 20 years that Stacks up there is one bit of green outside The Sony column, the lab, also tested how well you can hear human speech through the ANC. Since speech is one thing you might not want always muted and by that measure the airpods took the prize.
They are not the result of an accident, a lot of thought. A lot of r d went into them and it’s a very general purpose, holistically great product. They might not be as good at pure ANC applications like the xm5s, but they are a great headphone all around. So, even in these obnoxious, loud disruptive, noise environments, they’re still able to do a great job of reproducing speech, the question of speech actually gets at a larger idea about the future of headphones.
For all the progress made in degree of noise cancellation, none of the brands have gotten much smarter about deciding on the Fly, what to mute and what to allow in in their current state. None of the headphones showed any real, adaptable ANC. It’S all about Max attenuation right now, but that might change soon with iOS. 17 apple is launching an AI powered adaptive, audio mode for the airpods pro. It’S basically a dynamic blend of noise cancellation and transparency modes. It’Ll generally keep things quiet, but will listen for important. Sounds like car horns or Sirens or people talking to you in tune. Those sounds in clearly Apple thinks Max attenuation.
Isn’T what most users actually want? I don’t want to live in a vacuum right, I don’t want everything should be gone. So all I hear is my own pulse and my own heartbeat, that’s just unnerving, so I feel, like you know it’s that fine balance between you want a little bit of the environment around you right. Jacob thinks these features will kick off a new generation of AI powered headphones that don’t just block out the world. They manage it for you, it’s really about sort of the usability and the friendliness and the portability of ANSI.
That makes it a lot more holistic. In a sense, rather than just absolute throttle, the sound down is about making it smarter and better for us that could eventually mean a soundscape. That’S personalized to you, a custom blend of everything you want to hear and nothing you don’t. I live in. You know, Suburbia. There’S you know fair amount of space between houses and stuff like it’s not that bad out in the midwest, but people that live in urban, centers and stuff.
There might be things that you know I could do without this amount of noise in my life, but you can’t really close your ears right. There’S a lot of noises out there that you’re just constantly exposed to that you can’t do anything about, but through technological advancements. You might be able to, but we’re not there, yet we don’t even know how well those airpods features are going to work. So for now who owns the present, what are the best noise canceling headphones? It might sound like a cop-out, I know, but it depends on what you want out of them. If your single use case is, I want to sit in a little bubble and block out the world.
You can’t go wrong with the xm5s, but if you want to order a coffee or give some directions, while you’re rocking out try the airpods or if you like, that the Bose 700s make your Subway commute tolerable great. You have this really great processor and two transducers on your head that you can use to listen to and and give your own subjective experience think about it on a scale of one to five. Where would you put this? The point is, even after all, this Advanced numerical testing, you still have to be the judge of what you want to hear and what you don’t. .