Experts from the audio lab named the headphones with the best noise reduction

The editors of The Verge portal decided to find out which of the top headphones are the best in terms of active noise cancellation (ANC). For this they sent five headsets to the Head Acoustics audio lab: Sony WH-1000XM5, Bose QuietComfort 45, Bose Noise Canceling 700, Apple AirPods Max and Bose QC1 - the very first ANC headphones released in 2000.

The Head Acoustics test center specializes in sound and vibration analysis. He has partnered with some of the leading technology companies to conduct controlled environment audio tests for smartphones, headphones, TVs, smart speakers and other devices.

For the test, the lab experts used an array of eight microphones to record noisy environments such as railway platform, aircraft cabin and street intersection, and then reproduced them in a special room for sound testing. For this, eight speakers were used, arranged by analogy with microphones.

Headphones were placed on special mannequins with built-in microphones that mimic how a person hears various sounds.

In their tests, the Head Acoustics experts evaluated the performance of the ANC on a number of different parameters, including frequency attenuation, volume reduction, speech intelligibility and others. All results are in the table below.

The conclusions are as follows:

1. Sony WH-1000XM5 offer the best passive isolation and very good noise suppression. Headphones have demonstrated excellent performance in all conditions and can claim the title of optimal solution.
2. Apple AirPods Max took second place and did particularly well at reducing cabin noise with effective noise reduction in the low frequency range of 100-500 Hz. They also proved to be the best in terms of speech quality when working with ANC. So if you often listen to podcasts or audiobooks, then an Apple headset might be the best choice.

The Bose QC45 is next in third place, followed by the Bose Noise Canceling 700, the most affordable of the quartet of headphones.

The Bose QC1s far outperformed any of the current generation headphones, which is great. After all, this means that ANC technologies have made great progress over the past 20 years, experts added.