People sometimes ask why I bought a pair of €300 headphones. The answer is very simple, noise cancelling. Due to my job, I work in all sorts of noisy environments, trains, planes, cafes, you name it. Trying to concentrate on noisy environments is a nightmare, so to solve this, I simply bought the most expensive noise cancelling headphones I could find.

Bose noise cancelling headphones

I’ve demo’d the noise cancelling capabilities of my Bose QC15 headphones in noisy cafes, offices and all sorts of other places, but the most impressive place to experience the effect is on board an aircraft. Bose headphones quite frankly have by far the best noise cancelling capabilities of any headphones or ear phones I have ever tried. Nothing I have tried even comes close to matching them. There is also a newer version of the

Bose QC15 headphones

Noise cancelling demo

On a flight from Oslo to Berlin recently, I decided to shove a small Rødes Smartlav microphone inside my ear whilst wearing the headphones to see if I could measure a noticeable difference in noise levels. The results were absolutely stunning. In the graph below, you can see how noisy it was with no headphones, in the middle is after I stuck the microphone in my ear with the noise cancelling turned on, and on the right is the noise level with the noise cancelling turned off (but still in my ear, with the headphones on top.

qc15-graph

Hopefully this will demonstrate once and for all, why I bought a pair of €300 headphones, and also why I wouldn’t hesitate to cough up another €300 if something unpleasant were to happen to my current pair 🙂

Need even better noise cancelling?

If you are working somewhere insanely noisy, like a cafe with crazy loud music, then shoving some of those cheap disposable sponge ear plugs in your ears, underneath your headphones, can make a huge difference. But for an even greater effect, wearing Bose QC20 earphones underneath a pair of Bose noise cancelling headphones is even more effective. The downside to the noise cancelling earphones is that they are also very expensive and not very comfortable, particularly when they’re wedged underneath your headphones.

Bose QC20 headphones

Thanks to Arnstein Larsen for grabbing some of these on sale for me (so technically I didn’t pay €300 for them, but I would have if Arnstein didn’t find me some on the cheap).