Jan
17
What’s the difference between noise-isolating headphones and noise-cancelling headphones.?
By
Noise-isolating headphones simply passively block outside noises from reaching your ears by their mechanical construction. Sticking your fingers in your ears is a noise-isolating technique. Ear buds with a nice tight fit work similarly.
In contrast, noise-cancelling headphones use active electronics to "listen" to the noise around you and play and inverted signal through the headphones to cancel out the unwanted noise.
Most commercial "noise cancelling" headphones use a combination of both isolating and cancelling techniques. It turns out that noise cancellation works better at low frequencies and noise isolation works better at high frequencies. Using both together gives you good isolation across the whole frequency range.
1 Comments
January 17th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
Noise-isolating headphones simply passively block outside noises from reaching your ears by their mechanical construction. Sticking your fingers in your ears is a noise-isolating technique. Ear buds with a nice tight fit work similarly.
In contrast, noise-cancelling headphones use active electronics to "listen" to the noise around you and play and inverted signal through the headphones to cancel out the unwanted noise.
Most commercial "noise cancelling" headphones use a combination of both isolating and cancelling techniques. It turns out that noise cancellation works better at low frequencies and noise isolation works better at high frequencies. Using both together gives you good isolation across the whole frequency range.
References :