Inspired Robot

I’m flying to Boston in a few hours so I finally caved in and picked up a pair of decent travel headphones. Trusting in Sennheiser, since I own a pair of over the ear headphones that are great for home use. However they are a bit bulky if you want to travel light, so I bought the PXC 250 at the airport for $119 (I quickly checked Amazon’s price with my Droid and found their price was $120).

The PX 250 comes with noise cancelling technology dubbed NoiseGard, which is described in the user manual as “active noise compensation based on the principle of cancelling out sound in the low frequency range using counter-sound (inverse phase sound).” It comes with a nice little travelling case with room for the headphones, a side pocket that could hold spare batteries (noise cancellation requires 2 AAA alkaline batteries), and possibly enough room for a smallish mp3 player (it didn’t fit my 80 GB iPod classic too well, although it might fit without its leather case). The style is on-the-ear, which I find much more comfortable than the in ear variety (plus you don’t have to worry about ear wax). Frequency response reported in the manual is 10 to 21000 Hz.

The noise cancellation itself, in my limited experience using it here at the gate, works very well. The noise cancellation is turned on with a little switch in the NoiseGard device, which is a separate cylindrical component that also holds the batteries. The difference is immediately obvious, the ambient background noise as well as most chatter is mostly cancelled out. You can still hear a lot, but that low ambient noise is definitely reduced to almost nothing. With just the noise cancellation, no music, it is easy to test this essential feature of the headphones. Switching the power of the NoiseGard on and off, you realize just how much noise there actually is all around us in such places as airports (I look forward to testing it on the plane, but because of the weather my flight is delayed several hours). Playing something like Pärt’s Cantus in Memorium Benjamin Britten is much more enjoyable as a result. It is easier to hear the music when you don’t have all that background ambient noise interfering with your music.

So, for the price, I feel it offers effective noise cancellation, sound quality, comfort, and portability. I would have preferred not to have the NoiseGard as a separate device that I have to carry around, but I suppose the alternative is a bulkier headset as I noticed on a few others I tested in the store. But it’s not too big or heavy, and it works fine for sedentary purposes or walking around, which is all I ever do anyway.

I’m looking forward to getting more out of my iPod both on planes and, more importantly, at work.