Noise Cancelling Is Not the Feature I Actually Use

I wear headphones for most of a working day, and I have now done that with three different pairs for long enough to have an opinion that is not about the first hour. The conclusion is that the feature the entire category is marketed on — noise cancelling — is the one I care about least, and that the deciding factor, as with the keyboard I kept, is one no shop can demonstrate.

Comfort at hour six is a completely different property from comfort at minute one. All three pairs were fine when I put them on. By the afternoon, one had a clamping force that produced a specific ache above the ears that I would notice as irritability before I noticed as pain, which is an unpleasant way to discover it. Another had earcups that were deep enough but not tall enough, so the lower edge of my ear was folded slightly for eight hours. The third I forget I am wearing, and that is why I still have it.

None of that appears in a specification sheet, which is the monitor-arm problem again: the variables that decide comfort are geometric. Clamping force sometimes does, in newtons, and I have no calibrated sense of what a newton feels like on my head. What I would suggest instead is the only test I have found reliable: wear them for three hours in a shop’s return window, doing something that requires concentration, and pay attention to whether you take them off during a break because you want to or because you are relieved to. Anything slower to reveal itself, like a trackball’s first month, needs the whole return window.

On the noise cancelling itself, my honest experience is that I use it perhaps twice a month, on trains. In an office or at home, what I actually want is the opposite — to hear enough that I am not startled when someone appears beside me. All three pairs have a transparency mode and the differences between them are small and I have never once chosen a pair for it.

The feature I do use constantly, and which is barely marketed, is how quickly they connect to two devices and how gracefully they hand over. I switch between a laptop and a phone perhaps twenty times a day. One pair does this in about a second with no interaction. Another requires me to disconnect on one device before the other will take it, which is four taps, and after two months I stopped using them with my phone at all, which is a device I bought that I was now using less than I intended because of a behaviour nobody reviews.

Battery is the other thing I would rank above noise cancelling. Not the total — all three exceed a working day — but whether they charge on the cable that is already on my desk, and whether five minutes of charging gets me through a call. The pair I kept does. The pair I stopped using needed its own cable, which lived in a drawer, which is the same as not existing.

If I had to give a single piece of advice on this category it would be to stop reading comparisons of the sound. All three of these sounded good and the differences were audible and, after a week each, entirely irrelevant to whether I kept using them. The things that decided it were the shape of the earcup, the number of taps to switch device, and which cable it wants. None of those is a feature. All of them are the product.