Review

Noise cancelling measured in the environments people complain about

Aircraft cabins are the easy test. We used an open-plan office, a café and a bus, then plotted the failures.

Rania Saab

Published 22 July 2026
10 min read
15.1k reads

Noise cancelling measured in the environments people complain about — XENVORA Photograph: Close-up image of a pair of over-ear headphones with red accents and a red cable placed on a metal surface. The background is blurred, showing parts of an office interior., Nilo Velez / Wordpress (CC0) · Licence

9 Verdict score

Every device runs the same instrumented suite: sustained load, thermal logging, power draw at the wall, and a two-week daily-use period before a score is assigned.

Every set on the market handles a steady 90 Hz drone. The complaints we get are about voices two desks away, and almost nobody publishes numbers for that.

Speech is the hard band

Between 500 Hz and 2 kHz, active cancellation gives back very little, so the result is decided by the seal and the earcup. The winner here cut broadband speech by 14 dB, mostly passively.

Wind handling separated the field again: two units produced more noise than they removed above 18 km/h.