Noise Cancelling Headphones For Peaceful Listening
Go straight to recommended products.
Noise cancelling headphones are designed to prevent you from hearing outside noise. They use a microphone in the ear piece to sense the sound around the earpiece, and an active electronic circuit that amplifies, inverts the signal, and adds it to the music signal to cancel the acoustic noise pressure at the earpiece. (Some of the best noise cancelling headphones use digital signal processing (DSP) to create better isolation performance.) Because noise cancelling headphones have an internal headphone amplifier, there is no need or benefit from external headphone amplification. Closed headphones block high frequencies generally as well as noise cancelling cans, but do not isolate low frequencies as well, so are not as good for travel purposes. Noise cancelling headphones are almost always closed, and block high frequencies with the headphone seal. In Ear headphones provide far more noise blocking, but some people don't like putting them deep in their ears.
Noise Cancelling Headphone Reviews
The Sennhieser PXC 150 is a good sounding, entry level noise cancelling can and provides good low frequency isolation; high frequency noise isolation is not as good due to the small earpad size. These cans would be good for walking around the city, as they allow for some awareness of your surroundings. Denon's AH-NC723 is slightly larger and provides better isolation all around; the sound is good and its slight presence emphasis makes it a great movie and TV watching can with good speech intelligibility. The Monster Cable Beats by Dr. Dre noise cancelling headphone is full size and provides another step up in both sound quality and isolation--looks great and folds up, too. The Sennheiser PXC 350 and PXC 450 provide very good noise cancelling using Sennheiser's "Noise Guard" circuitry. The PXC 350 is the basic model and the PXC 450 is the deluxe model, with a variety of features. The best noise canceller we've heard is the Sony MDR-NC500D. Not only does it sound terrific, but its digital noise cancelling ability is simply astonishing. If your wallet can take the hit, you'll be blissfully unaware of anything but your music whenever you travel.
We've listed our top picks below but you can click here to see all noise cancelling headphones.
