Noise Cancelling versus Noise Reduction – The Difference When It Comes to Headphones

Noise-cancelling headphones use tiny microphones that identify the noise or sounds outside the headphones and then work to cancel out the sounds. Noise-reduction headphones (also known as noise-isolation headphones) reduce sound by being a barrier through which sounds cannot pass. What does all this mean? And how do these two differ?

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) states, “noise cancelling is a method for preventing unwanted sound. Sound consists of vibrations in the air, which can be represented as a wave. If a speaker emits a sound whose wave has the same amplitude and the exact opposite polarity to the original sound, the waves cancel out and the result is no sound at all.”

While this seems rather technical here is a more simple explanation: sound waves are created by the noise cancelling headphones to counter and eliminate the unwanted sound waves outside of the headphones or speakers. A digital signal processor determines what sound wave is needed to cancel the outside sound wave and it produces that sound and amplifies it through the headphones.