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Kuinox

WH-1000XM5 => $400

Bose QC45 => $279

Fairbuds XL => 249€ ($272 if I convert right now)

It's cheaper than two of the most popular headphones, how is there a "too high sustainability tax" ?!?

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But what's the sound quality like? If they're in the price range of $300-400 premium headphones, but perform like $100 headphones, that's still a "tax".

The price on noise canceling headphones is usually an indication of how good they do NC.

The vast amount of Bluetooth NC headphones sound like their 100$ wired counterpart.

I can really recommend the WH-1000XM5 btw. They are quite light and work surprisingly well even with iDevices. I tried to call my dad while I mowed the lawn (electric mower, but pretty loud one) and he understood me well. Audio pass through sounds like the real thing, I’d just like to be able to turn it louder.

That's a change then because the WH-1000XM3 microphone is really crap.

rtings.com describe the recording quality as pretty bad still on the XM5[0], but with markedly better mic noise suppression than the XM3[1].

(These are the most objective measurements I'm aware of.)

[0]: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/wh-1000xm5-wi...

[1]: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/wh-1000xm3-wi...

The XM5 have 8 microphones, that’s one of the major improvements over previous versions.

NC headphones typically have multiple microphones, the more there are, the better the NC can be. This is because the first part of NC is detecting ambient noise, the second being generating soundwaves to cancel out what's picked up by the mics.

With more mics it's possible to get more accurate NC, especially for directional sounds.

However more mics won't necessarily mean better call quality, they may not even be used at all for voice.

For example my Jabra NC pair has really good microphone quality for calls, this is done by having a dedicated boom microphone, in this case nothing to do with the multiple NC microphones.

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