- [Janitor] What's that?
- [Andru] Oh, it's a microphone.
- [Janitor] That ain't no microphone.
- So this is us out on the streets of New York
all sweaty with our new coworker, the KU 100.
We're here to put a quickly-evolving technology to the test,
active noise cancellation or ANC.
This feature is at a crossroads.
It's come a long way and it's about to make
a very different leap forward.
So we're testing some of the leading headphones
out here in the field and in an independent lab.
We even got one of the first pairs
of consumer ANC headphones to try out.
And thanks to our friend here,
you'll hear everything we heard.
(train rattles)
(footsteps clop) (car horn blares)
So this is your status update on noise cancellation,
how far it's come, who's doing it best, and what comes next.
(upbeat music)
These are the Bose QuietComfort,
or QC 1s, released in 2000.
It was an early milestone in ANC
and the oldest hardware we can scrounge up on eBay.
So might as well start here.
Here's what active noise cancellation means.
There's a little microphone in the ear cup
that picks up the sound waves headed to your ears.
Then an onboard circuit, which is actually
in this little dongle here for the QC 1s.
It calculates the inverse of that wave
and creates a kind of anti-noise.
So if this wave is the noise coming at you,
the headphones create this opposing wave
and plays it through the speakers.
The two cancel each other out.
The result isn't complete silence.
Here's a graph of how much sound the QC 1 can reduce.
The X axis is the frequency, and the Y axis is the change
in the decibel level of the sound.
Anything under this line is quieter.
ANC is pretty good at muffling lower frequencies
here around 120 hertz, like the drone of an airplane engine.
It doesn't work as well at higher frequencies
but a well-designed ear cup can block a lot of this
through passive attenuation,
just plugging your ears, basically.
Think of screeching brakes
or the whine of fluorescent lights.
But a lot has changed in 23 years.
The big players like Bose and Sony
have been improving their systems.
And more recently, Apple has joined the party
with the AirPods Pro and the AirPods Max.
Lots of other companies like Samsung
and Jabra have been competitive too.
So how far has ANC come since the QC 1s?
And who's the champ these days?
Well, we're putting a solid lineup to the test.
Along with the QC 1s, we have Bose's QC 45s,
and the Noise Canceling 700.
We'll be comparing those
with Sony's 1000XM5s and Apple's AirPods Max.
And just because, we have this pair
of $1,300 Bose headphones that you might use
if you're a helicopter pilot.
So let's go outside.
I'm gonna change my shirt and let's see.
I don't know.
- [Producer] Let's get sweaty.
- Let's get sweaty.
So first, meet the KU 100 dummy head microphone.
Noise canceling is hard to explain by just talking about it.
So we're gonna try to share with you how it sounds
by putting a bunch of noise canceling
headphones on the KU 100.
2 microphones, one in each ear,
left and right to replicate how humans hear sound.
Here's what the head hears by itself.
(birds chirping)
(passersby speak indistinctly)
Now for the full effect, here's us putting on
the Bose QC45s and flipping on the ANC.
(silence)
By the way, these headphones
aren't going to be playing other sounds
so you're listening for how quiet it gets.
Adding something like music here
would make that harder to discern.
So here are the other headphones.
(noise droning)
(silence)
(noise rustles)
(silence)
But we don't live and work in the middle of a field.
(upbeat music)
♪ Hello ♪
Watch your step.
♪ Hello ♪
(subway announcer speaks indistinctly)
(notification dings)
(noise rustles)
(noise rustles loudly)
(noise drones)
(silence)
(noise drones)
(upbeat music)
(passersby speak indistinctly)
(noise drones)
(passersby speak indistinctly)
(noise drones)
(silence)
(noise drones)
Real quick, we did play some spoken word
through the headphones with ANC
and here's what that sounds like.
- [Voice Recording] This is a voice recording
that might sound like a podcast or an audio book,
maybe the kind of voice that might talk
about mattress ads or cold cases.
You don't just listen to music.
So this is what a voice sounds like
through ANC headphones outta New York.
(upbeat music)
- So after all our tests, a few things stood out to us.
One, shocker, is that ANC has come
a long way since the QC 1s.
We also noticed some outliers in different scenarios
like the Bose 700s were shockingly good
on the subway platform.
Bose's A30 aviation headset worked great,
but not well enough to warrant
its $1,300 price tag for a daily commute.
Also, the Verge would not let me rent
a helicopter to test them properly.
Ultimately, our tests were fun,
but a little amateurish and very subjective and sweaty.
So we decided to call on the experts.
- Yeah, so my name is Jacob Sondergaard
and I work for a company called HEAD Acoustics.
- [Andru] Head Acoustics is an independent lab
that does all kinds of audio testing
for clients, large and small,
and they offer to help us out.
- So you sent us five headphones and asked us,
essentially, can you please test these the way
that you would recommend your customers test them, right?
The latest standards, the latest benchmarks,
the latest solutions to see how would these stack up.
- [Andru] HEAD acoustics is used to testing the latest
and greatest hardware.
So Jacob was actually pretty excited
to play with these old QC 1s for a change.
- We handled them with silk gloves.
We were afraid that if we looked at them,
they might disintegrate.
- [Andru] The lab used a dummy head similar to ours
but a little more advanced.
Surrounded by eight speakers that reproduced
a variety of sound environments with super high fidelity.
- [Jacob] We can make it sound like you're standing
on a street corner.
The street corner with traffic actually coming
in front of you and to the right of you,
because that's what it was like
when we did the recording on that street corner.
That allows us to test the products
in a real world scenario.
- HEAD acoustics ran a whole battery of tests.
It tracked decibel reduction at different frequencies
and weighted those measurements
based on the sensitivities of the human ear.
It even used algorithms to predict
how a few hundred people might rate each pair
of those headphones, which is wild.
Enough chitchat.
What were the results?
Jacob sent us a big table showing the scores
of all the headphones on all the tests.
The winner of each is highlighted in green
and at a glance you can see a trend.
- [Jacob] If you look down the table
and you see there is a column of green,
essentially, and that's the XM5s.
- [Andru] Looks like the Sonys did pretty well here.
- [Jacob] They are fantastic
at active noise cancellation and passive.
APMs, I'd say a good second place.
- [Andru] APMs, meaning the AirPods Max
- And the Boses, the QC 45s and the 700s,
sort of struggle a little bit in between
second, third, fourth spot a little bit.
- [Andru] Many of these graphs show
how close the modern headphones are
to each other in performance.
There are standouts.
Look at how good Sony's ear cups are
at just passive attenuation.
And as expected, test after test, the QC 1 struggled.
- We've seen these efforts
and these small incremental improvements.
Over 20 years that stacks up.
- [Andru] There is one bit of green outside the Sony column.
The lab also tested how well you can hear
human speech through the ANC
since speech is one thing you might not want always muted.
And by that measure, the AirPods took the prize.
- They are not the result of an accident.
A lot of thought, a lot of R&D went into them
and it's a very general purpose, holistically great product.
They might not be as good
at pure ANC applications like the XM5s,
but they are a great headphone all around.
So even in these obnoxious, loud,
disruptive noise environments,
they're still able to do a great job of reproducing speech.
(mellow music)
- [Andru] The question of speech actually gets
at a larger idea about the future of headphones.
For all the progress made in degree of noise cancellation,
none of the brands have gotten much smarter
about deciding on the fly what to mute and what to allow.
- In their current state,
none of the headphones showed any real adaptable ANC.
It's all about max attenuation right now.
- [Andru] But that might change soon with iOS 17,
Apple is launching an AI-powered adaptive audio mode
for the AirPods Pro.
It's basically a dynamic blend
of noise cancellation and transparency modes.
It'll generally keep things quiet,
but will listen for important sounds
like car horns or sirens or people talking to you,
and tune those sounds in.
Clearly, Apple thinks max attenuation
isn't what most users actually want.
- I don't wanna live in a vacuum, right?
I don't want everything to be gone
so all I hear is my own pulse and my own heartbeat.
That's just unnerving.
So I feel like it's that fine balance
between you want a little bit
of the environment around you, right?
- [Andru] Jacob thinks these features will kick off
a new generation of AI-powered headphones
that don't just block out the world,
they manage it for you.
- It's really about sort of the usability
and the friendliness and the portability of ANC
that makes it a lot more holistic in a sense
rather than just absolute throttle the sound down.
It's about making it smarter and better for us.
- [Andru] That could eventually mean a soundscape
that's personalized to you,
a custom blend of everything you want to hear
and nothing you don't.
- I live in suburbia.
There's a fair amount of space between houses
and stuff like that.
It's not that bad out in the Midwest
but people that live in urban centers and stuff,
there might be things that I could do without
this amount of noise in my life.
But you can't really close your ears, right?
There's a lot of noises out there
that you're just constantly exposed to
that you can't do anything about.
But through technological advancements,
you might be able to.
- But we're not there yet.
We don't even know how well those AirPods
features are gonna work.
So for now, who owns the present?
What are the best noise canceling headphones?
It might sound like a cop out, I know,
but it depends on what you want out of them.
- If your single use case is,
I wanna sit in a little bubble and block out the world,
you can't go wrong with the XM5s.
- [Andru] But if you want to order a coffee
or give some directions while you're rocking out,
try the AirPods.
Or if you like that the Bose 700s
make your subway commute tolerable, great.
- You have this really great processor
and two transducers on your head
that you can use to listen to
and give your own subjective experience.
Think about it on a scale of one to five,
where would you put this?
- The point is, even after all this advanced
numerical testing, you still have to be the judge
of what you want to hear and what you don't.
(passersby speak indistinctly)
(noise drones)
(silence)
(noise drones)
(silence)