Thread: Noise cancelling head phones

Thank you, PeteBass. I will research those tomorrow. It is Spring here in the States and I am about to be married to my tractor seat for a while again. Music is my life. Hours on the tractor without it is torture.

My best regards,

Cisco Kid

Originally Posted by ciscokid

Thank you, PeteBass. I will research those tomorrow. It is Spring here in the States and I am about to be married to my tractor seat for a while again. Music is my life. Hours on the tractor without it is torture.

My best regards,

Cisco Kid

Hang on a sec, you're in the USA? That should give you plenty more makes and models to chose from. I pointed you towards those because they were either available in Australia, or sold by companies happy to ship to Australia.

Happy earphone hunting! I'll post a review of my Sony's when they arrive.

The alternative to noise canceling headphone in industrial noise situations is either earmufs with headphones built in, purpose made high attenuation headphones like those used in aviation or using good earmufs with earbud type headphones under.

the latter is not the best option.

I seem to remember peltor do both a earmuff with a radio built in and an earmuff with headphone capacity.
TELEX make a product called "heardefender" which are a high attenuation headphone.... I actualy own a couple of pairs of these.
There are a variety of avaition intercom headsets both the fancy brands and low cost alternatives that would do the job..... you could proably rig the up with the two way/cb or mobile phone too.

As to the use of non aviation, or non safety industry noise cancelling headphone type products as a hearing protection device.....not with my ears.

these HIFI products are designed as comfort devices to eliminate nucance noise.
If I was traveling by air a lot, or other noisy transport, or had noisy neibours, or was beset by yowling children...... i would most certainly invest in a pair.
But not for the workshop or on machinery.

Now the serious question is the provide suitable protection against nagging.
Or would that place the user at risk of a smack in the head

cheers

Originally Posted by soundman

..............Now the serious question is the provide suitable protection against nagging.
Or would that place the user at risk of a smack in the head .........

I reckon the triton dust buster helmet/muffs/respirator setup might do the job there. (although you'd look a right wally watching telly in one )

Mick

Cisko

I use Sennheiser cordless non-sound attenuating earphones on my stereo. The sound quality is excellent, and at least matches that of my Tannoy speakers with a replacement cost in excess of $10,000.

There is no doubt that sound attenuation ear phones do work well - not totally effective, but they do greatly reduce noise levels.

In your situation, I think I'd use a quality product like the Sennheisers, not Radio Shack junk.

As they are a safety product, then they are probably fully deductible for tax purposes - talk to your accountant.

Tame that Cat.

Cheers

Graeme

Originally Posted by Petebass

........I'll post a review of my Sony's when they arrive.

OK they've arrived and I've quite disapointed. Scratch the Sony MDR-NC11's off your list. There's no noise cancellation at all. All the Noise cancelling feature does is add hiss. The noise cancelling headphones I bought previously from Jaycar for $50 work much better.

Furthermore, the earbuds don't do a very good job of sealing the ear canal. You have to jiggle them around to get a good seal, and as soon as you move it seal opens up. I have a pair of Sennhieser CX300's which do a MUCH better job of sealing the ear canal and sound much better, but they don't have noise cancelling.

So I guess the perfect product is one with the ear sealing on my Senny CX300's and the noise cancelling circuitry of my Jaycar headphones. I might have to pull out the "butchers knife" and soldering iron and make a "Franken-phones"...............

Hold the phones (pun intended). There's more to the story of the disappointment of the Sony MDR-NC11's.

As stated in my post above, I have a pair of Sennhieser CX-300's which work very well for what they are. I noticed the same chinese company that sold me the Sony noise-cancelling headphones also sold Sennhieser CX-300 and the price looked quite good. So I bought a pair.

As soon as they arrived I noticed something was wrong. My original Sennhiesers have a 90 degree angle at the plug, these ones were straight. The original Sennhiesers have a completely closed capsule, these ones had small holes where the front and back pieces are prssed together. Thr original Sennhiesers seal the ear canal very nicely, these ones didn't. Last of all, the original Sennhiesers sound nice, these ones sound merely OK.

They're FAKE. Very good fakes in that you'd only ever know if you happened to have an original set to compare them to. But fakes nonetheless.

Which of course means I've been wrongly blaming Sony for producing what I though was an inferior product in the MDR-NC11's. Chances are the real Sony product will work. The question is wether or not I'm prepared to fork out more money to find out. At this point I'm thinking I will buy an original pair. The internet reviews indicate it's worth a try........

A few years ago I had to travel to/from the US twice in one month. Given the amount of flying I did I invested in Sony MDR-NC20's. For a lot of flying some sort of noise cancelling is great. I would leave them on unplugged even if I wasn't listening to anything. I found that reducing the noise significantly reduced the amount of fatigue I suffered. It also enabled me to get some sleep after never being able to sleep on a plane previously.

Recently the sony's gave up (one ear started buzzing) and I've tried something different - Sennheiser CX300's. These style are known as canal phones - they're effectively earplugs with speakers. So there is no active component. Personally I prefer the canalphones over active cancellation. I found my ears would get sore with the sony's after a while and the noise active cancelling produced noticeable white noise. The canalphones do a better job of reducing noise for less than half the cost of the sony's and overall the sound quality is better with the Sennheisers.

However canalphones do come with some issues - there is that underwater effect where you can hear yourself more (e.g. swallowing, chewing) and vibration on the cord is transferred into noise in your ear. To use mine while walking I put the cord around the back of my neck and tuck the cord under a button to reduce vibration.

So it boils down to a personal preference.. try both styles if you can.

Originally Posted by Petebass

....... I've been wrongly blaming Sony for producing what I though was an inferior product in the MDR-NC11's. Chances are the real Sony product will work. The question is wether or not I'm prepared to fork out more money to find out. At this point I'm thinking I will buy an original pair. The internet reviews indicate it's worth a try........

I pulled the trigger on a set of Sony MDR-NC22's. They cost $195 Australian and what a difference!!! These ones actually work well. The seal the ear canal as well as my Sennhieser CX-300's, they reproduce music better than the CX-300's, and the noise-cancelling feature actually works. Mind you the noise cancelling on my big $60 Jaycar headphones is a little better, but for the convenience of not having something bulky on my head, the Sony's are much prefered.

With the noise cancelling feature activated, the music becomes noticably louder. This also happened on my Jaycar headphones but not as pronounced. On the Jaycars you could assume the music gets louder because the ambient noise is reduced. I guess the same applies for the Sony's but I suspect there's something in the circuitry adding to it in this case. It's not a big deal, just something you need to remember - when you activate the noise cancelling, remember to turn the volume down.

Highly recommended!

there are active noice canceling headphones designed to be used in place of standard ear muffs and there are ones designed to be used with a stereo for better sound quality, so long as you get the first ones you should be fine.
i work as a pilot of light planes and we have headphones of the same principal and they are fanastic. you cant hear any engine noise which is normally bloody loud.
so long as you use things for what theyre designed to do everything goes well.
brett

A couple of years ago I somewhat tentatively bought a pair of CREATIVE HN-505 noise cancelling headphones prior to flying to Europe. I chose the Creatives because they were the cheapest ones I could find around here at the time, $69 at DSE. These 'phones cancel by generating white noise and they worked quite well. Interestingly you can actually feel a pressure change in the ears when you turn them on. A byproduct of the Creative design is that they actually amplify the source signal as well. I found this to be a nuisance when plugged into the aircraft sound system as the armrest control was a stepped volume and the lowest setting was actually too loud to comfortably listen to. By comparison when using the airline supplied headset I needed the volume set to 8 /10 to get reasonable audibility.

One other artifact of using the headphones plugged into the aircraft audio system was when announcements were made, the announcement volume is always set to full blast and combined with the inherent amplification of the headphone design caused major pain to my hearing. In the end I just used the headphones with either my own mp3 player or unplugged, as SCO suggest, to get relief from the constant plane noise.

I have used these on several trips until earlier this year when I flew Malaysia Airlines to Europe and I left the headphones at home because the MAS advertising stated they supplied noise cancelling headphones. Unfortunately this turned out to be out of date information. I guess they just couldn't keep up the supply of AAA batteries needed by these things. In any case during the stopover in KL I spotted a pair of Targus branded NC headphones which I purchased for $18AUS (btw the Creative ones were also available for $35). It was interesting to compare the two. On the plane the Creative are more comfortable, I found the clamp pressure of the Targus to be tiring. The Targus also doesn't generate the same amount of white noise and weren't as pleasant when wearing unplugged, HOWEVER the problem with extra amplification didn't exist and for the first time I actually watched a couple of airline movies all the way through, being able to hear the sound track clearly, so some part of the NC circuitry was doing its job well!

I don't use the NC headphones in the workshop, I don't have really noisy machines running that often and I don't think either style would be much good when walloping the mallet chopping out mortises either.

Fuzzie, for $8, you could have got an in-line earphone volume control and solved all your problems. I use this one on planes and it's perfect.....

http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView...Max=&SUBCATID=

Been there, got that later. However it wasn't an option the first time I used them, no jaycar at 10000 m above the Indian ocean, but it's a point potential buyers should be aware of.

Being cheap, or maybe its because I'm pathologically driven to try and make something rather than buy it, for the second volume control I wanted I actually bought a $2 set of cheap bud earphones with integrated inline volume control from Crazy Clarks , cutoff the buds and replace with a stero jack from DSE.

Stripping and soldering the hair fine conductors was interesting, and I saved myself oh say about 2.125 cents )

Now here we ahve a horse of a different colour.

If the headphones are producing white noise (or any noise) that wouldnt be a noise canceling process rather a noise masking process.

This sort of technology give no noise level reduction at all.... in fact it gives a substantial noise increase.
This sort of technology can very easily result in hearing damage.
Add, ofending background noise, pluss masking noise and the increased music level to get over the other noise and very soon you have an unaceptably high sound preasure level.
The big problem is because of all the other noise the music will not seem loud at all.

This sort of technology is not clever.

cheers