jones wrote:
Quincy Abeyie wrote:
Noise cancelling headphones are a must for me when working at home with other people present. WH-1000XM3 is supposed to be the best one I think, but pretty pricey. I just have an old wired QC25, I still think they work decently well.
Mate I'm sorry but your headphone recommendation (tbf you didn't really recommend them) are horrible. The WH-1000 (I heard just the XM4, doubt XM3 sounds better) has the resolution of headphones that should cost around 100 and the QC25 are -I wrote something mean here before I realised you own them 😆- err not good. Bose in general is a lifestyle company barely above stuff like Monster Beats By Dre etc.
The only time I'd ever recommend active noise cancellation headphones is for people who are on a plane several times a week, and even then it's not a given. It's basically voodoo for everyone else because you need a consistent noise source for them to work as advertised otherwise they tend to distort. Most good cans have decent enough passive NC (almost every in ear monitors does unless you have freak ears) and paying a premium so I can have a builtin equaliser to frame my audio input so I don't realise the pitiful level of detail doesn't make any sense to me. Almost all ANC phones I ever tried also have far too much and muddy bass and poor or no mids too.
If you do indeed fly a lot and must have ANC I'd try the beyerdynamic Lagoon, although beyerdynamic themselves have much better cans in the same price region if you pass on the ANC.
You're right in assuming that I don't know much about audio quality, but I always make very informed choices when I buy things I consider expensive, reading a lot about the different products. I got a good Black Friday deal for the QC25, and they were already an old model when I bought them. ANC is certainly not only for people who fly a lot, it works equally well when you're on a bus or on a train. Also having lived in a small apartment where there's constantly people watching TV or playing video games while I sit on my computer in the same room, the volume I have to put my music on to not be annoyed is simply too high without ANC. I'm aware that Bose doesn't have very good audio, but their ANC is good , although less so now that others have started making better ones. Beyerdynamic Lagoon is one of the products I checked out, and from what I could gather they have good audio quality, but are less comfortable and have worse ANC than both Sony and Bose. And like Qwiss and you both said:
Qwiss! wrote:
The funny thing is 90% of people with expensive headphones are still listening to shitty compressed audio anyway.
Spotify is what I use to listen to music, streaming at 320 kbps. When I download TV shows and movies I don't bother downloading the biggest files, so the audio is compressed there as well. Other than that I use it for PS4, video chat and YouTube. None of those things require better sound quality for me, so comfort and noice cancelling is more important.
Also, the XM4 aren't even released yet.
