I quite often travel by plane or train, and like to listen to music on the way. Previously, I just used a standard pair of cheap, foldable on-ear headphones; but I either had to have them very loud (disturbing the people on either side) or the quieter parts of the music were often inaudible under the background noise.
Three options are available: earplug headphones, isolated studio headphones, or active noise-reduction headphones. The first of these (e.g. Shure, Etymotic) go half way down your ear canal to rest a centimeter or two from your ear drum, similar to a deep-seated earplug. I occasionally use earplugs, and find them time-consuming to get them to sit comfortably; I find the foam ones slip out of my ear however deep they are pushed, and the ridged silicon ones hurt my ears after a few insertions and removings. I therefore decided against this design.
The second kind, isolated studio headphones, are also passive noise-reduction, but are over-the-ear style, and just work through many layers of noise insulation. These tend to be quite big and bulky, though (taking up a lot of space in an aircraft carry-on bag), and can't block very low-frequency sounds - of the sort that you get a lot of in the rumbling of a train over tracks.
That leaves active noise-reduction, then. First, I ordered a pair of Plane Quiet Solitude's, for £140, after a very positive review
here. Since this isn't a review of them, I'll keep this short. Though the noise-cancelling was excellent (both passive, from the over-ear design, and active), the sound quality wasn't: it was very skewed towards the bass end, and I had to adjust the equalizer of my Creative Zen Touch heavily towards the treble before it was listenable to (and even then, it didn't produce the very high-frequency sounds). They were also quite bulky - which wasn't helped by the carrying case, which was very padded.
Not to mention that, after a bit more research, they turned out to be a rebranded version of the
Creative HN-700 headphones.
Which retail for £30.
So back to the retailers they went for a full refund (I do love the UK Distance Selling Regulations!), and, after a bit more research, I ordered the Sennheiser PXC300 for £90.
Soun quality was very good. With noise cancelling off, the headphones were well balanced, with perhaps a slight lack of low bass, but clear highs and mids. They are much smaller and lighter than the Solitude, and sit on top of the ear-lobe rather than around the ear. I had worried that they would press on the ear-lobe and be uncomfortable, but my concerns were unfounded; they were perfectly comfortable to wear for long periods of time. They also blocked a suprising amount of high-frequency sounds passively, since the padding material was soft and flexible enough that they were able to form a reasonable seal even though they sat on the ear-lobe. They fold up quite small, and fit inside a very flat case. The only really annoying thing is that the noise-cancelling hardware is in a long, heavy tube that Sennheiser, in their wisdom, have decided to neither integrate into the earphones nor put near the end of the wire that plugs into your mp3 player, but instead, have put half way along the wire, so if you are some distance away from what you are plugging it in to (e.g. if I am plugging it in to the sound card at the back of my computer) the tube hands in the air, pulling your headphones off. Luckily, the wire is long enough that if you are plugging the headphones into an mp3 player in your pocket, you can have the tube in your pocket as well without the wire becoming taut.
Now, the active noise cancelling. This does a reasonably good job of attenuating noise of frequencies below around 500 Hz. It works best with continuous drone, such as you would find on a train. If trying to block constantly changing sounds like drums, you still hear the initial 'thunk' (especially the higher frequency components), but a reasonable amount of the rest of the sound is eliminated beyond what the headphones passively block. The active noise cancelling does not seem to affect sound at and above around 1kHz, with the result that things like someone speaking to you sound an octave higher with the noise cancelling on than off. In some cases, it can actually be it easier to hear someone who's talking to you with the noise cancelling on than off, since any background hum is reduced much more than their voice. Turning the noise cancelling on in a quiet environment does introduce a not insignificant hiss, with the result that as background noise increases from zero, you get a point where the noise cancelling produces as much noise as it eliminates; and so only with background noise above that point does it make sense to turn the noise cancelling on. When listening to music, the headphones also slightly emphasise hiss that already exists: I began noticing small differences in background hiss between different tracks that I had previously thought were all relatively noise-free.
The active noise cancelling also affects the music, not inconsiderably. The volume level is significantly boosted, especially treble and bass - the slight lack of bass present when the noise cancelling was off is completely reversed, so there is now an excess of it (though still not nearly as much as there was in the flawed Solitude). The sound is generally much 'warmer'. In addition, you know how with headphones, the sound seems to be coming from a specific place in your head? With the noise cancelling off, the sound seems to originate from somewhere near the rear of the middle of my head; with it on, it moves forwards and outwards, and seems to come from around my ears (If anyone want's to explain how it does this, I'd love to hear it). The end result is rather pleasing to listen to for most music, and makes the more accurate and balanced sound that you get with the noise cancelling off seem relatively dull, flat, and boring. It's like being used to looking at photos with the contrast and saturation both boosted - if you're shown a more accurate, undoctored photo, it looks flat and dreary. In general, if you're the sort of person who prefers LPs to CDs for the extra warmth, you'll like the effect the active noise cancelling gives. If you're looking for absolute sonic accuracy, you won't.
The only problem I had was, whilst on a train going at a particular speed, listing to strings at a particular frequency range produced a fast, oscillatory 'flutter' sound with noise cancelling switched on. With it switched off, no such effect occured, but with it on, the effect occurred with any track that had violins of a particular pitch in it. I can only assume that a combination of the unit trying to cancel the oscillatory noise of the train going over the tracks and the sound wave of a string instrument interfered with each other in some way. I have not heard it with any other instrument other than strings, and only two tracks were affected, so I assume it was a one-off problem. If anyone else has had this problem, please post below.
In conclusion, I am going to stick with these headphones. They seem to provide a good balance between sound quality, comfort, noise-cancelling ability, and price.
