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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Someone managed to get a mention of them out of someone at Apple a while ago.

Not only are they quiet, but the EarPods (built in headphones) do active noise cancellation against them for the person wearing the Vision Pro.

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I don't think it is possible to do open air noise cancelation like that. Do you remember where you saw that mentioned?

Why not? There are active noise cancellation systems for airplanes and cars where the distance between the speaker and the ear is much greater than in this case.

As I understand it, niose cancelation requires an enclosed volume of space. It's why you never see it on open back headphones. Cars and aeroplanes are completely enclosed too.

Active noise cancellation is just destructive interference. It doesn't fundamentally require any sounds to be bouncing off surfaces, and mechanical isolation would be passive noise cancellation.

The main caveat to active noise cancellation is that you cannot construct a destructive interference pattern that cancels the noise everywhere. Creating destructive interference to cancel out the noise at your ears will unavoidably mean creating constructive interference somewhere else.

see galaxy buds live, the only limitation is that active noise cancellation works up to certain frequency when passive cancellation must take over

I think they have a lot of advantages here. They have tons of microphones, they know exactly what the noise sounds like, exactly where it is positioned and exactly where the speakers are relative to your ears.

I suspect that makes the problem constrained enough that it becomes possible.

its possible, but expensive.

Every Honda, even the cheap ones, do active noise cancelling in a whole car cabin. It’s definitely possible.

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