Re: do noise canceling headphones work well on location?

David McCall wrote:
"Rôgêr" <abuse@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:s5ydndCxB9pOxW3fRVn-rQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

My first experience with this sort of technology was with Carver audio gear, must have been 20 years ago. Inverted phase technology for creating more separated stereo. "Stay away from it"? To me, sort of like "the sky is falling advice". The phones I'm talking about claim 10db noise reduction, I'm not about to go through the trouble of testing that for accuracy. But seems about right. I understand the mathematical relationship of db's, but also understand that a 'perceived' drop of 10dbs is about a drop of 50% of sound. Still seems about right.

The phones simply detect the ambient sound and feed the phase inverted signal to the earphones. I didn't risk big bucks to try them. Yes, it includes good signal with the bad. But, I like them so far.


I have a pair of the $299 Bose headphones and like them in general,
but the "electronic" cancellation is only a little improvement over the
raw acoustic isolation from the cups and surround. If the battery goes
you have no audio though (there is no pass through without the noise
reduction).

Bill makes a good point. Normally you use noise reducing phones to
get rid of sound you don't want to hear so that you can hear some
other sound that you do want to hear. If the sound you are trying to
get of is essentially the same source as the sound you are recording
and monitoring, then the inherent distortion of noise canceling will
also be a distortion of your audio.

I have not tried the Bose phones for critical work (just pleasure), but
it does make sense that good acoustic isolation might be a better bet.
Even then the phones won't remove the background equally at all
frequencies, so there will still be some distortion even with acoustically
isolation.

David

My about $30 pair of noise cancelling Maxell headphones do have passthrough, and cover the ears quite nicely for pretty good sound insulation, with or without the active noise cancelling circuitry. I've been using them mostly at home for video editing so I won't bother the wife with the video sounds, and it does cut down on some of the ambient noises.

For this kind of use, the noise cancelling is ideal. *None* of the ambient sound are sounds coming through my sound card, so the right stuff gets cancelled.

At a ball game (as an example) the play-by-play guy and the color guy are talking into microphones and crowd noise is way down by comparison. So if the noise cancelling is mostly cutting back on crowd noise, that's fine by me.

At a concert it gets a little more complicated. They do cut back on some of the good sound that's coming through the headphones and therefore, by extension, some of the sound coming through the mics, but I've not tried them yet to see if the overall effect is good or bad.

Hey, for $30, I'm enjoying them. But there's no need for you or William to try them, you already know the answers.
.

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