Friday, September 13, 2013

2013 Best Noise-Canceling Headphones

Passive vs. Active Expertise
Passive noise-canceling headphones work by blocking noise from reaching your ears. This method involves giant earpieces that entirely cover your ears, combined with thick pieces of foam to insulate your ears from outside noises. This design is called circumaural noise-canceling headphones.
Another popular passive design includes earbuds that actually fit inside your ear, designed to deliver sound directly to your ear canal & block out outside sound like earplugs. Regrettably, passive noise-canceling headphones by themselves are usually not all that effective in actually cancelling noises, so lots of companies combine passive noise-canceling headphones with active noise-canceling expertise.
Active noise-canceling headphones use actual noise-canceling expertise to reduce noise levels, usually combined with a passive approach to help prevent exterior noise from reaching your ear canals. High-end active noise-canceling expertise makes use of a built-in microphone to monitor environmental noise, & generate a counter-frequency to -cancel' the noise.
However, lots of low-end active noise-canceling headphones don't include the microphone & ability to analyze environmental noise & produce noise-canceling inverse signals, so they basically produce low-level white noise designed to drown out auditory distractions.
Active or Reactive?
Because active noise-canceling headphones work by making a counter-signal to -block' the undesirable outside noise, you usually experience a slight delay between the headphones detecting noise & the noise-canceling expertise blocking it. This means that noise-canceling headphones are most effective at blocking constant noise, such as an airplane, train or automobile noise, & less effective at intermittent sounds, such as dog barking, children crying or horns honking.
The Limits of Noise-Canceling Expertise
Before you can choose if noise-canceling headphones are worth the cost, ask yourself what you require from a pair of noise-canceling headphones. Would you like something to block out most of the outside noise, leaving you with a comparatively audible listening experience? Or would you like noise-canceling headphones to surround you in a cone of silence, removing you from the outside world & delivering crystal-clear sound? If you are looking for the second option, you are probably not going to be happy with any set of noise-canceling headphones. They can eliminate lots of outside sound, but even the best noise-canceling headphones cannot block out everything.
The Wireless Option
Wireless noise-canceling headphones are another matter entirely. Wireless headphone expertise in general is not up to the level of sound quality provided by corded headphones. Noise-canceling headphones are imperfect. Combine the, & you have wireless noise-canceling headphones with mediocre sound & mediocre noise-cancellation. You can buy high-end wireless noise-canceling headphones for over $400 that produce reasonable quality results with both audio & noise-canceling, but for the most part, your best bet for wireless noise-canceling headphones is finding a passive, in-ear design.

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