The interesting thing for me from the tests was showing that anything above 1kHz is just passive noise cancellation. I have acoustics notes from university that are over a decade old that have 1kHz listed as the limit of active noise cancellation and it apparently hasn’t been improved in all that time.
Very timely, just when I’m looking for new headphones with noice cancelation. Noice noice cancelation.
Me too, and the quick connect and passoff with my various Apple devices makes the Max a clear standout. I can live with them being a close second to the Sony headphones, especially when the Max excels at the spoken word tests.
I just wish they didn’t look so goofy on the head.
And heavy. The Max’s are quite a bit heavier than competitors.
Perhaps Apple added metal weights again so the headphones appear more “sophisticated”, like they did with Beats…
The necks thanks them for the extra sophistication. 🙏
I’m allergic to Apple, so for me they are the least interesting from the list. I just purchased the Sony’s, I must be fucked up in the head to spend so much money on headphones but hey, it’s “treat yourself” day. And the Apple’s are of course unreasonably even more expensive… (see the other video someone posted here).
You probably did the right thing for headphones.
I’ve been looking for real data on the effectiveness of Sony’s MX5 vs Max vs others - specifically I want to see how well they do passive and ANC across the frequencies we are exposed to. And Verge have come through with this video: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/31/23852241/we-took-six-pairs-of-headphones-and-a-dummy-head-on-the-subway
Its a good video, but its also got real data from some experts. If you are TLDW - then skip to the end for a table from the experts.
The Sony MX5 are head and shoulders above the rest (with the max second in most categories).
I mean, it IS the video I posted in OP 😂
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=-zE1CsM-XLE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I love the XM4 headphones. They’re so good that when I was too focused on my phone I ended up missing my train. Sucks that it happened, happy with the noise cancellation quality.
I would buy the XM5, but I would prefer if I could use it with a 2.4Ghz dongle because the Bluetooth delay is huge. But I can’t do that or connect to the computer. I’d prefer to get a universal solution to my needs for $400, not “you can listen to music in these, but buy another pair for gaming”
Hmmm which headphones do you use that you get huge delay? Which codec do they use? I mean maybe my experience is not the greatest, I don’t do online shooters…but I don’t usually have trouble with delay, the audio is always synced to the action.
Every single one, there’s not a single Bluetooth headphone that is actually synced
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Sony released the WH-1000XM5 in May of last year
Is ANC safe to use while walking around a city like NYC? I personally find myself rarely needing it unless I’m flying in a plane where I really want to hear as little outside noise as possible.
No, its not safe, you wont hear incoming dangers. But these Noise Canceling Headphones have a nice feature for cities: with their microphones they can give you an „ambient sound“ feature. It mixes the noise from the outside to your music, so you can hear the surroundings while listening to music.
You can hear shit just fine compared to any headphones. There is nearly zero difference in sound that isn’t background noise.
While they mute the noise, they don’t make it impossible to discern, IMHO. I have the XM5, and I still hear the traffic, constructions etc. If I’m playign music it’s harder to hear, but definitely not if it’s just ANC by itself.
You’re fine. You can hear traffic just fine. Anytime telling you it’s any more dangerous than wearing regular headphones has clearly never used ANC.
