TRANSPARENCY AND TALKTHROUGH

How to block ambient noise without missing anything important

Sometimes you don’t want to cancel all of the noise around you: if you’re cancelling out the hum of an open-plan office or the thrum of city traffic, you may still want to hear your colleagues or be aware of potential hazards. While the names differ, most manufacturers of active noise-cancelling headphones offer modes that can cancel ambient noise while still letting some sound through.

In order to let outside sounds in without getting rid of noise cancelling altogether, features such as Transparency Mode do something slightly different from active noise cancellation. Both features use external microphones to listen to the sound around you, but while ANC analyses the audio and creates a reverse sound wave to cancel it out, Transparency Mode doesn’t. Many report that it feels more comfortable as a result:

ANC’s negative wave might not be audible, but it creates that odd ‘vacuum’ feeling you get with noise cancelling switched on.

With Transparency Mode the microphones listen to the same sound, but they then send it to your ears and adjust it to help you hear what you want to hear. The result is almost as if you aren’t wearing earbuds at all, and it doesn’t give you the same faintly unnatural feeling of pressure you get with full active noise cancelling switched on. In many cases you can adjust the strength of the effect too, so you can dial down the ambient noise if it’s still a little too loud for you.

One of the most useful applications of this is when you can have a conversation with others without removing your earbuds. Apple calls it Live Listen and JBL calls it TalkThru, but they’re both designed to help you hear an individual without removing your buds. The feature can also be really helpful for those with hearing damage: instead of struggling to hear someone over the hubbub of a busy café or other public place, you can hear the person you’re with much more clearly.

It’s important to note that as with active noise cancelling, transparency mode continues to operate whether or not you’re listening to music, podcasts or audiobooks: if your headphones are active and the feature is enabled, the microphones are listening and the processor is processing. While battery life has improved dramatically in recent years it’s still wise to ensure that everything is off when you’re not actively listening; if you don’t, you may find that when you do want to listen to something there isn’t much battery power left.