Hear how the best ANC headphones handle real world and lab tests

I appreciate it, oh it's a microphone, so there's us on the streets of New York, all sweaty with our new co-worker, the ku-100. We are here to put a rapidly evolving technology to the test. Active noise cancellation or ANC. This feature is at a crossroads has come a long way and is about to take a very different leap forward, so we are testing some of the leading

headphones

here in the field and in an independent lab we even got one of the first pairs of consumer ANC

headphones

. to try and thanks to our friend here, you'll

hear

everything we

hear

d, so this is your status update on noise cancellation, how far it's come, who's doing it

best

, and what's coming next.

These are the Bose Quiet Comfort or QC released in 2000. It was an early milestone in ANC and the oldest hardware we can get on eBay, so we might as well start here. This is what active noise cancellation means: there is a small microphone in the earpiece that picks up the sound waves heading to your ears and then an integrated circuit. which is actually in this little dongle for QA, it calculates the inverse of that wave and creates a kind of anti-noise, so if this wave is the noise coming towards you, the headphones create this opposite wave and the played through the speakers. two cancel each other the result is not complete silence here is a graph of how much sound the qc1 can reduce the x axis is the frequency and the y axis is the change in decibel level of the sound anything below this line is The quieter ANC is quite good at damping the lower frequencies here, around 120 hertz, like the drone of an aircraft engine.

It doesn't work as well at higher frequencies, but a well-designed headset can block out much of this through passive attenuation by simply covering your ears. Basically I think of squeaky 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 and many others. Companies like Samsung and Jabra have also been competitive, so how far has ANC come since the QCs and who is the champion these days?

Well, we are putting a solid line to the test along with the QCs, we have the Bose qc45s and noise cancellation. 700. we'll compare them to Sony's 1000xm5 and Apple's airpods Max and just because we have this pair of thirteen hundred dollar Bose headphones that you could use if you're a helicopter pilot, so let's go out, I'm going to change my shirt and uh, let's see , I don't know, let's sweat, let's sweat, so first let's get to know the ku-100 dummy head microphone noise cancellation is hard to explain just by talking about it, so let's try to share with you how. sound by placing a bunch of noise canceling headphones on the ku-100 two microphones one each year left and right to replicate how humans hear sound this is what the head here is on its own now for the full effect here we are us putting on the Bose qc45s and turning on the ANC by the way, these headphones aren't going to play other sounds, so you're hearing how quiet it gets.

Adding something like music here would make it harder to discern, so here are the other headphones, but we don't I don't live and work in the middle of a field, thanks, we're going

real

quick, we play some spoken words through the headphones with ANC and this is what it sounds like. This is a voice recording that could sound like a podcast or audiobook, maybe type. voice that could talk about mattress ads or Kohl's cases you don't just listen to music, this is what a voice sounds like through ANC headphones from New York. Thanks, after all our testing a few things stood out to us.

It's just that ANC has come a long way from quality control. We also noticed some outliers in different scenarios, like the Bose 700s were surprisingly good on the subway platform. The Bose a30 Aviation headphones performed very well, but not well enough to justify their thirteen hundred dollar price tag for a daily commute (plus The Verge wouldn't let me rent a helicopter to properly test them), ultimately our

tests

were fun but a not very amateurish and very subjective and sweaty, so we decided to call the experts. Yes, my name is Jacob Sonogarden and I work for a company called Head Acoustics head Acoustics is an independent lab that performs all types of audio testing for clients large and small and they are offering to help us, so you sent us five headphones and asked us: could you try them the way you would? recommend your customers test them correctly the latest standards the latest benchmarks the latest solution to see how they compare we

handle

d them with kid gloves we were afraid that if we looked at them they would disintegrate the lab used a dummy head similar to ours but a little more advanced surrounded by eight speakers reproducing a variety of sound environments with super high fidelity we can do it sounds like you are standing on the corner of a street, the corner of the street with traffic coming in front of you and to your right because that's how it was When we did the recording in that corner that allows us to test the products in a

real

-

world

scenario, Head Acoustics performed a full battery of

tests

, tracking decibel reduction at different frequencies and weighting those measurements based on the sensitivities of the human ear.

It even used algorithms to predict how a few hundred people would rate each pair of those headphones that It's pretty wild Chit Chat What were the results? Jacob sent us a large table showing the scores of all the headphones in 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 green column essentially and that is the xm5s, it seems like sony did pretty well here, they are fantastic at active noise cancellation and passive apms.

I would say a good second place apms, that is, the Max and the Bose airpods are the The qc45 and the 700 fight a little between the second third fourth place. Many of these graphs show how close modern headphones are to each other in performance. There are highlights. Look how good Sony's headphones are with passive attenuation. and as expected, test after test the qc1 struggled, we've seen these efforts and these small incremental improvements and you know for 20 years there's a little bit of green outside Sony's spine. The lab also tested how well human speech can be heard. via ANC, since speech is something you may not always want to mute and by that measure the airpods took the prize, they are not the result of an accident, a lot of thought went into them, a lot of research went into them and it is a very general purpose, integrally brilliant. product, they may not be as good in pure ANC applications as the xm5, but they are great headphones all around, so even in these annoying and distracting noise environments, they can still do a great job of reproducing speech, the speech question really comes back to us with a broader idea about the future of headphones despite all the advances made in the degree of noise cancellation, neither brand has gotten much smarter when it comes to deciding on Fly what to mute and what to allow in their current state, neither earbud showed any truly adaptive ANC, right now it's all about maximum attenuation, but that could change soon with iOS 17.

Apple is launching an AI-powered adaptive audio mode to the airpods pro. It is basically a dynamic combination of noise cancellation and transparency modes. It will generally keep things quiet, but you will hear important sounds like car horns or sirens or people talking to you in tune. Those sounds clearly Apple believes that maximum dimming is not what most users really want. I don't want to live in a vacuum, right? I don't want it all. It should go away, so all I hear is my own pulse and my own heartbeat, that's just disconcerting, so I feel like you know it's that delicate balance between you want a little bit of the environment around you, right?

Jacob believes these characteristics will start a new generation. of AI powered headsets that don't just block out the

world

but manage it for you, it's actually about ANSI usability, ease and portability that makes it much more holistic in a sense rather than just absolutely speeding up Sound. down is about making it smarter and better for us, which could eventually mean a custom soundscape for you, a custom mix of everything you want to hear and none of what you don't. I live in the suburbs, you know, there's a good amount of space between houses. and things like it's not that bad in the midwest, but people who live in urban centers and stuff there may be things that you know I could do without this amount of noise in my life, but you can't really close your ears, there's There are a lot of noises that you are constantly exposed to and that you can't do anything about, but through technological advances you may be able to, but we are not there yet, we don't even know how well the functions are working. of the Airpods. to work so for now who owns the present what are the

best

noise canceling headphones may seem like a cop out I know but it depends on what you want from them if your only 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 having fun, try the airpods or if you like the Bose 700s to make your Metro ride bearable. have this really cool processor and two transducers in your head that you can use to listen and provide 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 these advanced numerical tests. You still have to be the judge of what you want to hear and what you don't.