Headphone Features
FEATURES -
Headphones are available with a wide range of feature sets to make your listening more convenient, useful and pleasurable for your particular listening style.
Noise Cancelling: Noise cancelling headphones are designed to prevent you from hearing ambient noise. They use tiny microphones within the earpieces to sense the ambient noise around you via an active [battery powered] electronic circuit that amplifies, inverts and then adds the signal back to the music signal to "cancel" the acoustic ambient noise. Some of the best noise cancelling headphones use digital signal processing (DSP) to create better isolation performance.
Closed Headphones can block upper treble frequencies nearly as well as noise cancelling headphones, but do not effectively remove low rumble frequencies like those heard in an airplane or train cabin, so they are not as good for travel purposes.
In Ear Headphones provide far more noise blocking ability than any other type of headphone, including noise-cancelling designs. However, some listeners may not like inserting in-ear headphones into their ears like earplugs as required.
Wireless: There are generally two categories of wireless headphones:
TWO MOST POPULAR WIRELESS HEADPHONE AUDIO TRANSMISSION METHODS
- Bluetooth is probably the most common wireless transmission for smartphones and tablets. Bluetooth audio quality is steadily improving and essentially noise-free thanks to digital-based signal transmission. However its has limitations that customers should be aware of:
- Consistency of implementation: Not all Bluetooth implementations are created equal, and not all implementations will work the same between different paired devices. For example, Apple's devices tend to pair beautifully and painlessly with their own phones or computers, but can be a little finicky when trying to pair to a Windows laptop.
- Consistency of connection: Anyone who has used Bluetooth before will know that sometimes the connection strength, even when proximity isn't an issue, can be quite poor. Momentary drop outs, digital warbles, and full-blown disconnections are not uncommon with these devices.
- Bandwidth limitations: Most wireless implementations these days have solved this issue, but older or lesser Bluetooth headphones (especially those that also use a microphone) can sometimes place limits on the frequency bandwidth of your music depending on the quality of the connection.
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Range: Bluetooth is generally not known for having strong connection integrity even at close range, but as one drifts farther than 10 feet, the connection gets more and more fragile.
- Latency: Bluetooth isn't known for being a low-latency connection paradigm in itself. Though there are implementations that aim to amend this shortcoming, ideally one wouldn't choose to use Bluetooth if latency was incredibly important.
- WiFi (generally 2.4GHz) is part of a newer paradigm that's come around recently, and is very popular with gamers for their superior performance in basically all signal/connectivity metrics when compared to Bluetooth. especially regarding latency. The main inconvenience with this paradigm is that they generally aren't natively-implemented into most media devices like computers, phones, or gaming consoles, such that they almost always require an external dongle to make it work.
This means that they're not exactly suitable for an "on the go" use case, and can be a little more complex to set up vs. Bluetooth, but for listening at home they have numerous benefits. - Connections are generally more consistent regardless of your media device, because the dongle is usually made specifically to work with the headphone.
- Connections are generally more resistant to dropouts, spurious noises, or full-blown disconnections.
- Overall bandwidth can be much higher, so the music rarely (if ever) suffers from a quality standpoint
- Range and latency are also generally able to be much better due to not being limited by Bluetooth's inherent capacity threshold.
Microphone: Headphones with a built-in mic allow you to listen to music and answer your phone calls. There are many different types of headset headphones including in ear headsets, Bluetooth headsets and others.
In the next Headphone 101 series, we'll be walking our way through the various applications of different headphones. We sure hope to see you there!