False Economy.?

[Jordyboy9]

Is it false economy to spend £175 on a pair of headphones the reason for asking as I know nothing about them I see people on planes with them on and they are oblivious to what’s going on around them so I thought I might get a set no outside noise

[Buenchico]

Noise cancelling headphones work best when there's a continuous noise around you (such as the drone of an aircraft's engines). They're not so good at handling spontaneous noise (such as when your neighbour's dog suddenly starting up a barking competition with his rival across the road).

So whether they'd be any good for you would depend, in part at least, upon the type of background noise that you're seeking to eliminate.

[Buenchico]

I'm not sure how well noise cancelling headphones would handle that. They work by picking up external noise and then reproducing it within the headphones but out of phase with the original sound (so that the peaks of the external noise are cancelled out by the troughs of the noise generated within the headphones). That's easy enough when the same noise is constantly present outside the headphones but trickier to do when the pitch and volume of people's voices is constantly changing.

[Buenchico]

Er, do you normally hang around with drunken Glaswegian women?

[woofgang]

from experience of using them on trains, the bose ones do mute human chatter to a certain extent...but that's chatter from a load of people so again continuous-ish.

[New Judge]

If they are in row 10, get yourself a seat in row 25.

[Old_Geezer]

Doesn't everyone hang around with drunken Glaswegian women ?

I hear they are developing house windows using the same cancelling principle. Just need to calculate the anti-sound and play it in the time the original sound travels from the detector pane to the speaker pane.

[Kidas]

Not a false economy.

I have noise-cancelling headphones and use them only on long-distance flights.

They work so well that you have to take them off to hear what the cabin crew are saying. And they drown out the worst of crying babies, yelling toddlers and (as Buenchico says) engine drone.

Definitely worth it, if you fly a lot.