Noise-canceling headphones are not the same as noise-canceling headphones. Direct Sound Extreme Isolation headphones are best classified as noise-canceling headphones because they don’t use electronic components to actively cancel out ambient noise. Instead, Direct Sound headphones physically block sound by reflecting sound away from your ears while enclosing your ears in proprietary sound-isolating ear muffs. The result is a higher degree of sound isolation and superior sound quality for your music.
Why Noise Canceling Headphones Sound Better
Most noise-canceling headphones use electronic devices to “hear” the sound around you, so that they can produce an “opposite” sound wave to blackpods cancel the sound inside the headphones. This is called active noise cancellation because the headphones are actively destroying the incoming sound with a canceling sound wave. For audiophiles like us, the main problem with this type of noise reduction is that the “canceling” sound wave, which is meant to block out ambient noise, also destroys the music that you are actually trying to listen to. There is simply no way around it. Let’s take a simple sound frequency as an example. Suppose there is 1000 Hz ambient noise around you. So your active noise canceling headphones produce a sound wave that blocks that frequency inside your headphones. But what if the music you are listening to also has a 1000 Hz sound? That frequency in your music is also canceled. So now you have canceled the sound you really want to hear.
The problem does not stop there. People who make active noise canceling headphones know this, so they build their headphones to artificially boost certain sound frequencies in their music because they know that noise canceling electronics are going to destroy those frequencies. Now your music is totally distorted from what the artists intended it to hear and instead sounds like an approximation of what your headphone company wants you to hear. The end result is very unsatisfactory.
There is yet another problem with active noise canceling headphones. The “canceller” sound waves they produce are not silent. If you put on a pair of active noise canceling headphones and just turn on the noise canceling electronics, you will hear a very disorienting noise. This is the sound of “canceled” sound waves inside the headphones. This static, vibrating noise doesn’t go away when you start playing your music. Therefore, you will hear annoying and annoying static noise in the background of EVERYTHING you hear. This destroys the quality of your music and makes it sound like you are listening to an old record or a doubled tape or something. You won’t get the crisp audio that you could get.