Seeking Silence

Whether you’re reclined to the horizontal in the nose of a plane, or crammed on the morning bus commute, noise-cancelling headphones can create an oasis of calm for you, a bed of silence for your music...

Noise-cancelling headphones have long been on the essential travel tech hitlist of every executive about town — if proof be needed, bust through the curtain at the front of your economy cabin and you’ll find barely a head up there unadorned by one of the major providers of the noise-cancelling breed.

But these days, the inflight inversion market has spread back down the fuselage, through Premium Economy to the huddled masses in the rest of the plane, while back on the ground the grinding commute at each end of the working day is also seeing bus and train travel benefit from similarly silenced solo passengers keen to cancel the rumble of track or road.

So noise-cancellers have gone mainstream. It’s not that these headphones have dropped in price — the market leader and our current Sound+Image Award holder, the Bose QC25, is $399, and that’s about the level at which Bose has always pitched its executive earcoddlers. But while that used to represent a premium price for headphones, the market has leapfrogged this sector as the likes of Beats changed the public perception of even entrylevel headwear, so that $399 is now a merely moderate headphone price.

Meanwhile there are many more brands in the NC space than ever before, recognising this wider appeal and the continued growth of headphones in general. Looking for... So what are we looking for in a noisecancelling model? As ever, sound quality comes first. It doesn’t matter how cunning the cancellation of an NC design, how silent the subsequent bed delivered, if they then assault you with an ugly sound balance,

Second we’d put the twin design criteria of comfort and portability. Comfort because we Australians regularly endure longer haul flights than our city-hopping European and States-side cousins, and portability because you don’t want your hand luggage unnecessarily swollen by a carrycase wider than your daybag. Size is part of this, then — small is good when turning your head for shut-eye,

or when dropping the can round your neck as you unbelt to allow the infirm middle-seat passenger her fourth toilet trip of the flight.

An additional bonus for some designs is wirelessness, as Bluetooth arrives in the NC space — it’s less useful for inflight entertainment, but on a daily commute the NC/BT combo frees you up very nicely.

The downside of NC designs over conventional wired headphones is their need for power, essential for doing the concellation, doubly so if Bluetooth is also included. Will a rechargeable battery last the 24 hours to Europe? Can the headphones at least work passively if they run out of juice?

This is not a worry with designs that use a standard battery — you can just carry a spare. But then you have replacement costs — significant if your headphones are used daily for the commute.

So criteria established, let’s take to the skies. The following models were all taken aloft for trial on our way to the recent CE China show in Shenzen (nine hours in the Economy cabin of a 747-400 each way), while also extensively enjoyed against the noisy rise and fall of Sydney’s grinding commute, and for careful analysis in relative peace at home.