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Comment by JonathanBeuys | Hacker News Reader

What are the best noise cancelling headphones to work in cafes?

Im using Bose Quiet Comfort II and I always wish they would cancel better.

SONY WH-1000XM5 are the best of the bunch, as of now. They offer superlative quality noise cancellation, which I can’t do without.

I have been waiting for Apple to update its AirPods Max before buying them, as I’ve heard much to be admired about them, but no luck yet.

SONY is the one to beat. Expensive, but unrivaled NC and sound fidelity.

The Sony XM5's are touted by most reviewers as the best for noise cancelling and calls in noisy environments, although Bose, Apple, Sennheiser etc. are right up there. Each model has it's pros and cons.

I haven't tried XM4's or XM5's but I do have both XM3's and AirPods Max. The XM3's have excellent cancellation and are more comfortable, but have more of a bass-cannon sort of sound profile compared to the AirPods Max, which have cancellation almost as good but have a generally more balanced sound.

I have sony XM3 earbuds and the app has EQ. I assume the XM3 headset app does as well since its the same app.

I'll have to play with that some. I knew of it but assumed the EQ was done on the phone rather than on the headphones, which if true kind of renders it moot because I use my headphones on several devices that the app doesn't run on.

I have the Jabra evolve2 85 and, while being ridiculously expensive, are the best I've used.

Even better for calls than the Sony's, for me anyway.

At this price point and quality though it's more about personal preference, choosing what's most important: comfort, voice call quality, music quality, etc

Noise cancelling only really works for constant sounds (like airplane engines), not for background music/chatter.

The Sony ones worked quite well for that when I tried them. Was genuinely impressed

You're right that it works best for that, but headsets with good noise cancelling tend to have good isolation and the noise cancelling does do some work to suppress other sounds.

Why is that btw? When I first heard of noise cancelling a few years ago, I figured electrons travel faster than sound waves (by a few orders of magnitude), so they'd just have a mic on the outside and speakers on the inside, amplifier in between and connect plus and minus the wrong way around to create an inverse signal. No chips with delay needed, just an analog signal going directly from mic to speaker. Shouldn't that cancel literally all sound?

Apparently they, instead, all use some software solution that mainly works for constant noises. I don't understand why

the sound travels through the air, hits the microphone, gets transmitted to a cpu that creates an inverse signal, and is then transmitted to your ears. No matter what the cancellation signal is always later than received sound. The received sound arrives first. noises that don't change much have the most similarity between the sound from a couple milliseconds ago to the sound now, and so are most effective.

But I will say my sony wf-1000xm3 do seem to do a pretty decent job muffling most noises.

The way I experience it, noise cancelling works best on low frequencies of whatever you are listening. It complements passive noise isolation, which work best for high frequencies. Voice is usually in the middle, and it tends to be less attenuated, often that's a feature: you don't want do hear background noise, but you want to hear when people talk to you.

Noise cancelling headphones are never just about cancellation, they are always a combination of both cancellation and isolation working together, and it involves a lot of tradeoffs.

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