Name: Hear how the best ANC headphones handle real world and lab tests
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T15:40:13.000Z
Duration: 12 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So this is us, out on the streets of New York, all sweaty, with our new co-worker the KU100.

We're here to put a quickly evolving technology to the test.

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.

So this is your status update on noise cancellation.

How far it's come, who's doing it best, and what comes next.

These are the Bose QuietComfort, or QC1s, released in 2000.

It was an early milestone in ANC, and the oldest hardware we can scrounge up on eBay.

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 QC1s, 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.

Here's a graph of how much sound the QC1 can reduce.

The x-axis is the frequency, and the y-axis is the change in the decibel level of the sound.

ANC is pretty good at muffling lower frequencies, here around 120 Hz, 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.

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.

Well, we're putting a solid lineup to the test.

Along with the QC1s, we have Bose's QC45s 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.

I'm going to change my shirt and, uh, let's I don't know.

So, first, meet the KU100 dummy head microphone.

Noise-canceling is hard to explain by just talking about it, so we're going to try to share with you how it sounds by putting a bunch of noise-canceling headphones on the KU100.

Two microphones, one in each ear, left and right, to replicate how humans hear sound.

Now, for the full effect, here's us putting on the Bose QC45s and flipping on the ANC.

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.

But, we don't live and work in the middle of a field.

Real quick, we did play some spoken word through the headphones with ANC, and here's what that sounds like.

This is a voice recording that might sound like a podcast or an audiobook.

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 out of New York.

So, after all our tests, a few things stood out to us.

One, shocker, is that ANC has come a long way since the QC1s.

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.

Yeah, so my name is Jacob Sondergaard, and I work for a company called HeadAcoustics.

HeadAcoustics is an independent lab that does all kinds of audio testing for clients, large and small.

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.

HeadAcoustics is used to testing the latest and greatest hardware.

So, Jacob was actually pretty excited to play with these old QC1s for a change.

We were afraid that if we looked at them, they might disintegrate.

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.

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.

HeadAcoustics 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.

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.

If you look down the table and you see there is a column of green, essentially, and that's the XM5s.

Looks like the Sonys did pretty well here.

They are fantastic at active noise cancellation and passive APMs, I'd say a good second place.

And the Bose's, the QC45s and the 700s, sort of struggle a little bit in between second, third, fourth spot a little bit.

Many of these graphs show how close the modern headphones are to each other in performance.

Look at how good Sony's ear cups are at just passive attenuation.

And, as expected, test after test, the QC1 struggled.

We've seen these efforts and these small incremental improvements and, you know, over 20 years, that stacks up.

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.

A lot of thought, a lot of R&D went into them, and it's a very general purpose, holistically great product.

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Hear how the best ANC headphones handle real world and lab tests

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