I have a thing for quiet. Probably more than most people. I’m disturbed by all kinds of noises, from light bonks to moderate thrashes to unsettling thwocks. Motorcycles and helicopters are anathema. People talking loudly can render me borderline homicidal.
There’s more, but you get the general idea. “A quiet-living man who prefers to spend his evenings in the quiet of his room/who likes an atmosphere as peaceful as an undiscovered tomb.” That’s me — of course except when I’m playing my own music via my fine audiophile-grade sound system or watching a movie, etc. Naturally I make noise sometimes myself. I use a cordless leaf blower on a daily basis in the back yard. I use electric hedge trimmers. I vacuum. I can run the dishwasher (Bosch 800 and incredibly quiet) and the laundry (also sonically very well-behaved.) I’m not a monk in his cell. Neither am I a boisterous family with small children and dogs and a mom-wife with a buzz-saw voice (the house immediately behind me) nor an aging hoarder with a squad of yappy small dogs (next door).
I also spend part of my work days riding on BART trains, which as anyone in the Bay Area knows, are egregious sonic offenders. The fancy new BART trains are, if anything, noisier than the old ones.
The upshot is that I’ve become quite the afficionado of noise-cancelling headphones. As such I’ve seen fit to acquire a small hoard of same. So here are my thoughts about the ones I have. Since I’m a teacher I’m giving them letter grades as well.
Bose Quiet Comfort II Earbuds
On the whole I’m not big on earbuds. My princess-and-the-pea ears become sore easily. I remember a pair of wired Shure earbuds of a decade ago that left my ears aching in short order. I dislike over-ear headphones for the same reason, vastly preferring the circum-ear instead that surround my ears rather than pressing down on my earlobes.
For what they are, the Bose earbuds do a good job. The thing I’ve noticed with earbuds is that they just can’t cancel sound as well as headphones. But the Bose are the best ones I’ve tried. The audio quality is mediocre, however. And even with these I start feeling the discomfort before too long.
C+
Sony WF-1000XM5 Earbuds
I wound up taking these back to the store and getting a refund. The overall sound quality is quite good. But the noise cancellation doesn’t work worth beans, and believe me I tried every Internet group for advice, including Sony’s own suggestions. Maybe I had a defective pair. I don’t know.
Furthermore, they had an annoying habit of not turning on, or mysteriously playing in mono instead of stereo.
F
Sony WH-1000XM4 Headphones
It’s hard to realize that these are made by the same folks who came up with those troublesome earbuds. Excellent headphones, pure and simple. The audio quality is extremely good, although I find it a bit mushy overall. However, they do a fine job with noise cancellation, enough so that all last year they were my go-to headphones for BART.
They’re also extremely comfortable and boast superb battery life.
B+
Bose QuietComfort 700 Headphones
When it comes to noise cancellation these are the absolute champions. They cancel everything. Furthermore, they’re light.
They tend to make clunk-clunk noises when you move your head, caused by the way the cups themselves are connected via plastic slider thingies. You can fix it with some silicon lubricant. It makes them look odd since they wind up with goo along the sides, but it’s an effective remedy.
The sound quality is OK. I’ve just never found a Bose product that can really cut the mustard sonically. These produce a distinctly undernourished sound. They’re just fine with simple stuff—such as the nature sounds I like to play—but you really don’t want them for music. At least I don’t.
B+/A-
Apple AirPods Max
Leave it to Apple to nail the whole shebang. The AirPods Max are high-class jobbers that are designed to work their best within an Apple-centric environment. That’s me. I also like the controls, which eschew those pesky surface gesture things where you brush a finger this way or that way and can wind up changing something just because you tried to move them a bit and touched the wrong place. The AirPods Max have an honest-to-God volume knob (a crown like on the AppleWatch) that’s also pushable for play/pause, and a real, flesh-and-blood button that you press to select between ambient sound and noise cancellation. And that’s it. No power button since they deal with all that automatically. No Bluetooth button. No “special” button that does whatever you want it to do, and most of the time just sits there unused. You can touch your AirPods Max with confidence that you aren’t going to inadvertently change tracks or change the volume or mute or or or …
The noise cancellation is on par with the Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones, not quite at the Bose 700s level, but close enough.
Sound quality is excellent. Full-bodied, crisp response, without the Bose emaciation or the Sony mush. The AirPods Max are my only noise-cancellation headphones that can handle a quality recording of a Baroque trio sonata without making fools out of themselves. Sonically they can’t hold a candle to my Sennheiser HD 800s, but those are audiophile indoor-listening cans, cabled, sans noise cancellation, and requiring audiophile-grade amplification to strut their stuff. The day hasn’t arrived when wireless ANC headphones can compete with Sennheiser HD 800s or their brethren.
I’ll grant that they’re a little heavy. Not jogging cans, if one is into that sort of thing. (I’m not.) But they’re really comfortable nonetheless. It’s easy to forget you’re wearing them. Yes, they’re the most expensive of the models I’ve listed. But Apple tax notwithstanding, you definitely get what you pay for.
A