Ask HN: Do you use noise cancelling headphones? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you use noise cancelling headphones?

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Kind of a weird thing, but I'll often keep my noise cancelling headphones on at home when working, even if not listening to music or in a meeting. Mostly in that it cuts out the background noise and family, etc. It got me curious if anyone else does the same.

For reference, recently updated to a Bose QC 45 after my older 25s started randomly dropping connection all the time.

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My Bose QC 45s have the most annoying low battery warning I've ever experienced. Beginning at 10% battery, every 5 minutes all input media is paused so a computer generated voice can inform me "BATTERY LOW, PLEASE CHARGE NOW." 10% battery can last for up to an hour, but woe betide you for trying to utilize the time.

It is an atrocious UX. It cannot be disabled via the paired mobile app. Do not buy these headphones!

I also hate the ux for these headphones. Have you found a good alternative? I loved the wired qc20s (the earbud ones) but they aren’t being made anymore.

I wonder if the idea here is to encourage you to charge the headphones sooner to extend the battery's lifespan. Sure you can get another hour from that 10%, but doing that often can hurt the longevity of the battery

One can think of many better ways to engineer this protection, starting with the most common: lie to the user and never discharge the last 10%, shutting down early.

I used to wear them pretty much every waking moment, but recently I have become very suspicious of their effect on me.

I don't necessarily think it has a negative affect on my hearing, but I feel in general that it brings down my outward awareness as a whole. It's a very isolating experience, being in noise-canceling, and I think normalizing being in that zone conditions my mind to become very insular and broadly ignorant of my surroundings. As I start wearing them less, this noticeably diminishes.

And speaking specifically to my personal situation, I feel it directly aggravates my anxiety through this mechanism.

I tried to use Bose QC's at home for a few years but eventually gave up. The problem with Bose is they noise cancel everything but voice, which is precisely the opposite of what I want cancelled. I like hearing footsteps, pets and all the normal noises of the house but I don't want to hear my wife gossiping on the phone about so-and-so's parents at the school and their messy divorce.

Bose QC are specifically targeted at air travel where you can noise cancel the airplane noise but still talk to the stewardess or your neighbor. I found a no-name brand of noise canceling headphones off Amazon a much better solution because they had better ear pads that isolated sound while their worse noise canceling didn't give you the same "pressure" feeling that the Bose headphones give you. And they dulled the voice chatter more effectively. It seems like if voice chatter doesn't have the high frequency component it is easier for me to ignore it. I think it's also why I find it next to impossible to pay attention to someone dialed into an online meeting.

Eventually circumstances allowed me to buy nicer homes with dedicated office space and I find I don't use noise canceling devices any longer. My current home is an executive-style-home-on-the-cheap and has noise isolating insulation in interior walls which really helps.

What is strange is that the emotion present in the voice chatter around me is a huge factor. My son can be gaming in the office with me and talking with his friends and I have no problem with focus. If he gets frustrated or too hyped up, I have no hope of concentrating and I have to kick him out of the room. We have since worked out an agreement and he doesn't play LoL or Destiny while I am working, the two games that cause anger management issues for him. :)

Noise cancelling headphones are the complement to earplugs. Earplugs do exactly as you want, they remove high frequency noise but pass low frequency noise.

Use both together to remove all noise, or one or the other as a high/low pass filter.

I used too, but I have developed an intuition that active noise cancelation is harmful in the long run. This is using some of the best options (Sony, Apple). Just weird ear sensations and "phantom" sounds after extended usage (maybe like tinnitus).

I get this weird phenomenon you're describing to an extent - phantom sounds, like bass or low frequencies. I have used a bedside white noise machine turned to brown noise to block low frequency rumbling of loud trucks and bass music but it has this terrifying effect of making me think I hear low frequencies that aren't actually there. It's maddening.

Only when on the plane. I could see wearing noise canceling headphones all the time if I lived in a particularly urban area.

Me too, only on a plane

Noise cancelling headphones need to generate exactly opposite "anti-noise" to cancel noise. This of course works better at lower frequencies.

They're near magical at cutting down the rumble of ventilation systems, airplane wind noise, and even bus engines. But spoken voice contains high-pitch elements that they just can't track and so you still hear it. Though attenuated, it's at about the same ratio to the attenuated background noise.

For me, personally, this means I generally don't use them as just noise cancellation devices. I'd rather have the whole sound spectrum than "cone of silence" with voices still cutting through. I find playing some music, even at a low level, solves that, but I concentrate better with random background burble than with music.

Mine are QC35s. I also have a cheap pair that cost about 1/8 as much that doesn't have quite the "whoa" effect of the Bose ones, but still very satisfyingly cuts down diesel engine roar in the rear seating row of a bus!

I had the Sony WH1000XM3s and found similar - I still loved them but it was cutting out low droning noises etc that they shone at and voices definitely cut though quite a bit.

Recently though I got the Bose Quietcomfort Earbuds 2 (in ears), and the noise cancelling on them is next-level. So much better at cutting out higher pitches and I love them. I often use them in a room with a loud television and people speaking and they cut out a lot of speech and general noise

It still doesn't create silence in those conditions admittedly, but it's very impressive

I always thought that the inability to filter voice is a feature, not a bug. They're great (or useless) in offices.

One of my earliest were NC headphones, which was amazing, then I bought some of the thick ear muff ones just because they're cheap. But I plan to have one of both now that most devices don't have a headphone jack anyway.

Slightly off topic: what’s a good headset/EarPod mic that eliminates my background noise so that who I’m calling doesn’t hear the noise around me?

piggybacking here. I can't do without in-ears. Headsets/devices that cover the whole ear are too uncomfortable and all other options' mic catches simply every possible sound generated in whichever room I'm in.

I recently went all out and bought a SM7B as my daily calls have doubled to ~80% of the day. It’s been a complete game changer. I live next to a train line, have children and pets and it isolates so well.

Hands down Jabra Evolve 75 (or it's successor). Great noise cancellation for your voice to the benefit of the other end of the line. In a deliberate test, my colleague could hear me talk but couldn't hear music playing 5 feet from me.

https://www.amazon.com/Jabra-Evolve-Wireless-Headset-Stereo/...

Yes. I've used my QC35 for several years now on a daily basis, and they've been one of the few tech game-changers for me personally.

I generally use them to lower the volume I can play the actual environmental-noise blocking audio, which is normally a combination (ie at the same time) of white noise (specifically RainyMood) and whatever rythmic soundtrack will help me stay in flow.

I mean by that I don't use them alone, but they enable me to play stuff for extended periods so the risk to my hearing is considerably lower than playing it without noise cancelling.

i use my apple gen 2 airpods and the noise cancellation is not nothing, but it's all still no match for traffic noise, which is what i really want something for. i do still wear them in the cafe and they help, tho like others, i wonder if they're really just destroying my hearing even faster.

i also have some model of these Jabra call center-type headphones with the slide down/out microphone boom. They don't have active noise cancellation, i don't think?, but they're pretty good at just keeping out outside noise. if i have anything do with it, everyone on my calls/zooms must use a headset and microphone -- i don't want garbage echoing and reverberating and people missing things just because someone is too lazy to get a quality audio setup. ditto podcasts -- 'professional' podcasts and i hear the main show host's voice echoing off his own walls? f** is wrong with you? for my coworkers, we're remote, great, but take this shit seriously, at least on my time. :) these particular Jabras i have are too tight on my ears - i need to see if i can make them clamp with a bit less force.

https://www.jabra.com/business/office-headsets/jabra-evolve/...

getting true hearing-protecting headphones of some type so that i can walk/jog/be on the street without cranking the volume up to eleventy would be so legit. there's a ton of noise, but if we got rid of just car tire noise, we'd probably be good.

Sony XM4 headphones. They are pricey, but a fantastic bit of kit. The noise canceling is not perfect but good enough that sometimes I will just wear them while walking around even if not listening to anything. I like how they "dull everything out" giving you room to think.

Using the tozo nc9s and the soundcore q20 for work. Interchangeably used depending on the portability and noise levels. The nc9s are portable and decent at cutting out droning noises but they have a n occasional weird desynchronisation when you listen to music, one earbud might be a few millis behind the other in stereo :( The soundcore is solid. Both are quite affordable compared to Bose, Sony…

I upgraded from QC25s to Bose 700s.

While the Bose 700’s integrated non-user-replaceable battery is one annoyance everyone is moving to, you also can’t use the headphones at all while charging. Not even in plugged-in analog mode without noise cancellation.

It’s a brick while charging.

I also feel like the ear-pad covers have poorer durability than previous generations. I’m a bit rough with them (e.g. throw in backpack, I never use the case).

I need noise cancelling (or close to it) headphones I can sleep on my side with. I have a crappy $20 headband I got from Amazon that does OK but lets a fair amount of sound leak in. I live on an extremely loud street and can block some of it out with a noise machine, but find headphones needed to really block everything out. Anyone try a pair they like?

Not much.

My Bose QC's made me nauseous when I started using them. I acclimatized to a degree but only ever use them in flights. And they "sound" weird compared to eg. covering my ears with my palms.

Also tried AirPods Pro and didn't like the feature (or the amount they stick into your ears); swapped for the cheaper / older model which I love.

Yes, Sennheiser Momentum 4. It's rather comfortable, and once you remove it, the unbelievable low HUM of electrical appliances deafens you for a moment. IMHO Sennheiser's sound signature is much more natural than Sony XM's. It works well under Linux too (Sonys do not support aptX).

Yeah I use them all day long. They do a good job of blocking out background noise from living in the middle of a city.

Don't listen to music/audio much with headphones anymore because my inner ears started to hurt from it. But I do use construction ear muffs often to drown out noise - they're quite effective and are basically the same thing OP is asking about (not listening music). The ear protection is much cheaper

Yes and I think it'll effect your hearing gradually. So will music, but they're too good to give up.

In what way do you suspect they will effect your hearing gradually? Isn't the whole point that the waveform that reaches your ear is mostly destructively interfered with and is no longer physically present? Maybe there are some very high or very low frequency harmonics but I can't imagine that damaging your hearing. Maybe I am wrong!

Oh not in that way, I just feel like I play music louder because of the noise cancelling. Obviously that's not ideal but I enjoy it.

I use a nice set of over the ear headphones with ANC capability but turned off. I prefer the regular isolation, not the active. The active does some weird things to my hearing that may be related to some other things I have going on.

Yes, I wear them over my better wired in-ear monitors that have good passive isolation.

An especially good combo on noisy flights, etc.

Yes, depending on noise levels, but I try not to, because I think it's bad to have no airflow around the ear.

Use plain old corded with plug headphones.

Used corded headphones for a very long time... only switched when I got my Pixel 2XL that didn't have a headphone jack. Felt the noise cancelling was well worth it and stuck to that. Been generally really happy with it.

Sony XM3. I do the same.

This is very common; I think there are probably memes about it.

I miss the days when things became memes. Memes are now just the Elon Musk of jokes.

i just use cheap apple earbuds 90% of the time, I find that's plenty along with some nice easy listening symphonic music, if I need to kill the background noise.

I use apple airpods max they work great!

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