“A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence.” – Leopold Stokowski

“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation…tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.” – Jean Arp

The headphones themselves seem a bit too humble to boast, so we tend to overlook their almost magical ability to deliver on a paradox: to give you both sound and silence. Headphones are both a sanctuary where we draw close to the sacred music of our soul, and refuge away from the chaotic din of modern life.

Traditional sealed headphones have long been delivering on this promise, and have gotten better and better at delivering great sound over the last few decades, but they haven’t really gotten much better at delivering great silence. Noise cancelling headphones attempt to remedy that, and largely succeed … largely, but not completely.

Hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself here, let’s start at the beginning …

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While evaluating sound quality is largely a subjective task with measurements playing a supporting roll, determining how much isolation headphones provide can be done almost exclusively through measurement.  Our web based graphing system can only display four products at a time so I’ll show the results in two graphs.  Fortunately that will also allow me to show some measurements of noise cancelling cans that weren’t officially in this review as well. We’ll start with the low performers.
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You simply can’t get on a plane without seeing a pair of Bose noise cancelling headphones, and we were really excited to have a listen. (HeadRoom doesn’t carry these headphones, but we’d sure like to!)
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If planes, trains, and automobiles are good places for bells and whistles, the Sony MDR-NC500D will feel right at home while you’re out and about.
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Monster Cable might get a bit peeved that we reviewed these headphones against the best noise cancelling cans out there because they don’t promote them as such, but they are noise cancelling headphones, and I’m sure they won’t mind too much because we ended up liking them a lot.

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“All of life is a dispute over taste and tasting.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

The raging debate over objective (everything is measurable) versus subjective (only the listening experience counts) theories of audio evaluation will, no doubt, rage on. The rational among us will carefully choose bits of wisdom from both sides as we develop our ability to critically evaluate audio gear, and then hopefully learn the the most important lesson of all: when the evaluating is done, just relax and enjoy the music.

In this post I’d like to provide you with a simple tool to help you get some objective ear training.

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“You can fool all of the people some of the time.” – Abraham Lincoln

“It’s desperately easy to fool yourself.” – Me

Studio Six Digital's RealTime Analyser for your iTouch/iPhone.

I know, I do it all the time, especially when evaluating how things sound. It’s just so easy for your head to tweak what you think you hear. Everything from a bad day at the office, to a little nasal stuffiness can have big affect on your listening skills. I’ve found that having access to measured performance helps to focus and stabilize subjective listening evaluations …

… and I think I’ve just found the quick and dirty solution. 

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