Noise Cancellation
I’m not sure how this came to be but it seems that the norm is to wear headphones outside at any and every opportunity that you can. Listen to the best show, songs, and/or podcasts as you carry along with your day. Somehow we’ve managed to disconnect more and more form the real world. Enter the noise cancellation feature that seems to be more and more prominent with each passing year.
If you’ve been under a rock, noice cancelling headphones drown out the ambient noise from the users ears. It’s the difference between falling asleep during your commute to work because they work TOO well or making it on time. None the less, the feats that we’ve reached with this technology is incredible.
As most of us may know, sound travels in waves and the waves length is called a frequency. A frequency refers to the length from one peak to another. Fantastic, short 101 on sound. What’s this got to do with noise cancellation? By goly, I’m glad you asked. EVERYTHING.
In the image above, you’ll notice that the black frequency resembles ambient sound like the subway or an airplane. The red sound waves are the same except they reciprocate it and essentially cancels the former. Voula, that is noise cancelling technology. For every peak there is a valley, and for every valley a peak. So what components make it possible for us to achieve noiseless bliss?
If you are familiar with airpod pros, you’ll notice that there’s a black strip facing away from the user. It’s a microphone that collects those frequencies we previously spoke about. It sends that information to a processor that will create the ‘anti-noise’ and send that to your ears as well as the audio of your choosing. Pretty neat, I know. Great tech to block the haters.
D R A W B A C K S
Honestly, it sounds great to have the option to completely drown out all surrounding sounds but some cons to these kinds of headphones are that they obviously cost an arm and a leg. Because of the added power consumption to create the anti-noise from the speaker, battery consumption is higher than regular headphones. Lastly, the noise cancelling tech also reduces audio quality although there is perceived better quality due to the silence. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Later sk8r.
