Question about Active Noise Cancellation alternatives - eviltoast

I’ve got a audio/tech question, maybe someone here might have some insight into.

I’m in need of noise cancellation for various and sundry reasons. i own a pair of BOSE ANC headphones which are tits, but have been looking for a pair of GOOD ANC earbuds that don’t cost $300 bucks, and had an idea that all ANC appears to be, when you break it down, is sound that the earphones/earbuds produce which bounce around in the ear canal and hit the ear drum in certain ways as to “cancel” out various types of background noise.

Again the ANC on my BOSE are amazing. Does anyone know, or have even heard of (no pun intended) anyone who has produced “noise cancelling” sound files?

It seems as if noise cancelling hardware like earphones are producing sounds that cancel out noise, mp3/flac files of “noise cancelling” sound could be on offer somewhere.

Dunno, figured i’d ask. Hope this is the right place to do that, and I’m not breaking any rules, I didn’t know where else to post this.

  • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    Do you want to just block all sound or do you want the extra features that come with active noise cancellation headphones like speech passthrough? What you are proposing doesn’t exist because it makes no sense, active noise cancellation is done by recording the audio outside the headphone, inverting the amplitude and attempting to align the phase to cancel it out in real time.

    In reality active noise cancellation only works for more or less constant sounds below 1000Hz, anything higher than that and the headphones block exactly as much noise as any other pair of sealed headphones.

    You will get better noise reduction with IEMs than headphones, deep insertion headphones like Etymotic beat the pants off Bose for noise isolation at every frequency, are cheaper, and as a plus sound better than any noise cancelling set you can buy.