Generally, if you meet me while I'm out and about, you'll find me with some form of Bose logo hanging on the outside of my ear. After all, if you want to keep the noise of the outside world out, there's little better — the firm makes the best noise-canceling headphones and the best noise-cancelling earbuds.
I'd recommend the brand's headphones and earbuds to anyone looking to make their commute a little smoother, their plane journeys more engaging, and roadtrips more chill. However, I've recently found that in most areas of my life, I actually don't really want to block that much noise anymore.
But why? When I literally have the cream of the crop of noise-canceling headphones available at my fingertips, why on earth am I choosing to listen to the world around me more and instead listen to my music through more noisy headphones? Or, in the case of being outside, not listen to music at all?
It's getting dangerous outside
The outside world is very noisy; this much is true. But it's also an increasingly dangerous place to spend any amount of time, especially when you live in a city. Traffic is picking up, cars are getting larger and quieter, and there are more people than ever riding electric bicycles and scooters on footpaths and other places that should be reserved for those walking.
Walking to work has more hazards than I've ever seen. Even just walking down a station platform is treacherous, as people mill past and knock you left, right, and center like a fleshy pinball. As a result, it's incredibly important to have all of your senses available — and that includes your hearing.
I can see things happen around me, and I can even, to some degree, feel when hazards are nearby, but I also need to be able to hear what's going. Electric cars (in my locale, at least) are required to make noise, but they're still quieter than an internal combustion beast. ANC headphones keep all that noise at bay — for better or for worse.
It means that wearing my trusty QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds gen 2 feels more stressful than helpful when I'm walking around a town, city, or train station. So in order to feel and potentially even be safer, I'm going to leave them off.
Wires sound better
When I'm at home, I don't really need noise canceling. Sure, the buildings across the road can get noisy on occasion, and someone doing the vacuuming can get irritating, but for the most part, I don't really need ANC. There are even things that I need to listen out for, like the door, or my pet guinea pig begging for another treat.
Instead, I want something that just sounds really, really good — and there's not much I'd choose over something wired like the Meze 105 AER, or similar.
It doesn't matter to me that they don't block out noise — only that their open-backed design allows for a very wide, very pleasing sound. They're more detailed than ANC-closed backs could ever hope to be, as well as being lighter and more comfortable to boot.
That, and I'll never have to recharge them.
My experiment
To test out how much I'll miss my earbuds and headphones that block every single noise, I'll be going without them for a week. That way I can see if I really do relieve stress when I'm out and about, and whether the sound of my keyboard bothers me enough that I want to go straight back to something with ANC.
I suspect that I'll not miss them much — but I have been proven very wrong before. Only time and a fair amount of listening will tell. Or no listening, as they case may be.
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