Or just get one with a good old 3.5mm jack.
Beyer Dynamic, AKG and Shure have several options much cheaper than these Bose or Sony headsets which still give you at least 10x the audio-performance.
For headsets, if you care about usability, portability, longevity and performance, wired is still the no-brainer choice.
It's complicated.
The lowest level opinion is "Bose and Beats are awesome, soooo much bass!!!" That's the typical consumer.
The level above that is what you said. That's sometimes called mid-fi. At least these things don't have major flaws anymore.
The next level is companies and products specifically focused on high performance - Stax, Audeze, Sennheiser, Etymotic, etc and their best models. That's the "audiophile" level (and here truth is mixed with a lot of bullshit also - stay away from head-fi.org, it's a cesspool of pseudoscience).
And the level above that is when you realize imperfections in headphones can be corrected via DSPs, for the most part.
I have the Sony noise cancelling flagship model. By default, it's deeply flawed. It's tuned to the taste of the average consumer at Walmart ("moar basssss!!!"). But apply the oratory1990 corrections (from Reddit) and they sound like some nearly-flawless high end devices. The corrections are based on precise lab measurements of the headphones, and basically revert some of their flaws via digital processing.
The future is DSP.
With proper corrections based on objective measurements, any headphones can sound neutral and balanced.
That's just an audiophile meme, there's no reality to it.
> you'll never get the noise cancelling ones sounding good because there are 2 processes affecting the sound
That's so wrong I'm not even sure where to begin refuting it.
Seems like you're picking a lot of audiophile mythology along the way.
I’ve returned them and replaced them with much better, naturally damping, closed head-phones. And the audio is so much better, at a fraction of the cost.
Noise cancellation in the hifi-space is just snake oil, and I’m not having it.
It just blocks/reverses sudden sharp, loud noises (shots). It will let normal speech and such (and pretty much everything else) right through.
No, but noise cancelling headsets are often sold as premium headsets, with the obvious implication that they are to have high sound-quality. And quite often, they don’t.
It's not for hi-fi. Livable-fi in combination with noise cancellation is a bonus. The headphones are for noise cancellation, not hi-fi.
(These cans are usually not too bad with noise cancellation turned off. But when you turn it on, it's because noise cancellation is what you want.)
The problem with the wire, at least the provided one, is that it's pretty stiff so it picks up a lot of noise and the plug doesn't lock to the headphone side so I'm not sure how well it would hold during prolonged usage. But the plug is standard, so at least the cable can be changed easily.
But if you want to buy headphones today with NC, most of them will be wireless.
There’s still lots of places you won’t find Bluetooth, but there’s very few places you won’t find a connector for a 3.5mm jack.