Collected works and current thoughts
As I walked my dog today, I noticed that while I was wearing over the ear, noise-cancelling headphones, I also had a pair of “true wireless”, noise-cancelling ear buds in my pocket. What would happen if I wore them both?
The quick version is, adding both does have some value, but a cheep pair of ear protectors, like I wear when mowing the law, do as much as an actual additional noise-cancelling headphones.
When I got home, I put on the earbuds. Next, on go the over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones.
At first, I had both turned on, with noise-cancelling enabled. Other than having two headphones on, the earbuds sounded like they do normally. The external headphones, with noise-cancelling on, didn’t make much of a difference.
I ended up trying all combinations of on, off, transient noise enabled. Since order is important, that meant a total of 9 combinations.
In short, having an external pair of over-the-ear headphones negates external noise well enough that you can wear the earbuds with noise-cancelling disabled to get the best overall audio quality. The over-the-ear headphones didn’t make much of a difference on, off, or with transient noise enabled.
Now that is settled, I’ll not feel the need to wear both pairs in hope of some kind of magical audio results. I really didn’t expect much, though I did wonder if the simultaneous noise-cancelling would somehow interfere with each other. Disappointingly, they did not.
Back when I started wearing noise-cancelling headphones (when a certain airline still flew turbo props into CID), I went through 3 different manufactures before settling on my first pair. The first 3 pairs interacted with the turbo props and actually increased the noise (resonance frequency stuff I guess). So had my two new pairs interacted, I would have been pleasantly surprised.
