If you are looking for Noise Cancelling Headphones or Sound Isolating Earphones, there are several things you need to know about these headphones and consider before you make a choice. The most expensive is not always the best

How do they work? How do they cancel noise?
Noise Cancelling Headphones works by blocking out ambient sounds or acoustic noise by a technology called active noise control. How this works is that the electronic circuitry in the headphone generates an anti noise signal in the speaker and cancels out the ambient noise. With these headphones, you can enjoy your music or podcasts from your mp3 players at a lower and more comfortable volume than with normal headphones and is also much better for your ears.

For frequent travellers, using these types of noise cancelling headphones will block out enough noise engine noise to make the journey enjoyable and allow someone to sleep on a plane or train. If you need to block out human chatter, these won’t work but Sound Isolating Earphones will, more of that below.

Origins of the Noise Cancelling Headphones
The first commercial noise cancelling headphones was created by Dr Amar Bose who found that the standard airline headphones he was given on a flight were not doing a good job of filtering out the noise within the aircraft and the loud engine noise. He set about researching the technology and in 1986, he came up with the first Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones. Today, the Bose Comfort Noise Cancelling Headphones range is one of the most effective and most popular on the market.

Currently, a number of airlines supply noise-cancelling headphones in their business and first class cabins. Noise-cancelling is especially effective against airplane engine noise. In this circumstance, the headphones are about the same size as normal headphones. The actual electronics which are located in the plane handrest, take the sound from the microphone behind the headphone, invert it, and add it back into the audio signal.

Limitations to Noise Cancelling Headphones

These headphones are know to work well for sounds that are continuous, such as the hum of a refrigerator or the sound in an airplane cabin, but they are not very effective as a filter for the human voice or any other rapidly changing audio signals.

Most of the these headphones can sometimes introduce another noise like a high frequency hiss. They usually also use up a lot of power and the batteries need to be recharged frequently. Some of the these headphones can be quite heavy compared to ordinary headphones, especially nowadays when the batteries are included in them too.