I recently purchased a pair of Sennheiser PCX150 noise cancelling headphones for use at work. I was having trouble with the noise levels in the office and I personally find that while playing music in normal headphones helps, it also makes it hard to concentrate. After having had them for a month or so it's time to review them.
I purchased my pair for around $150 from The Source by Circuit City.
For those of you who haven't seen noise cancelling headphones in person the idea is pretty simple. All the ones I've seen work in the same general manner. There is a microphone and a processor on the cable between the headphones and the headphone jack. The microphone detects the background noise and creates some sort of counter noise wave that cancels it out. At least that's my very simplistic understanding of how it works.
In the PCX150 the microphone/processor component is circular and just wide enough for it's single AAA battery. It's around 3 inches long. There is also a switch that allows you to turn the noise cancelling on and off. One thing I've noticed is that while the noise cancelling is enabled the music sounds a lot better. Bass response is improved and the music sounds clearer.
Where I work is air conditioned and the air conditioner is quite loud. It's also an open pod idea with our pod being next to the BAs pod. This results in a lot of noise when they are having conversations.
The first thing I noticed when I turned them on was the fact that the air conditioning noise went away immediately. I think because of constant and consistent nature of the noise they have an easy time dealing with it.
With voices it's a little different. You still hear people but it's much quieter. And if you put some music on at a low volume the voices completely go away.
The have two complaints with them. The first is the fact that while using them I get a weird pressure feeling on my ears. I assume it's related to whatever they do to cancel the actual noise. It's only really noticeable if I pay attention though so it's not a deal breaker. The second is that after using them for a long period of time they make my ears hurt a bit.
I use to work with a guy who had Bose QuietComfort 2 noise cancelling headphones. They were larger then the ones I have and much more expensive but like all things you get what you pay for. With his you could put them on and not hear a thing. It was pretty crazy how good they were at filtering noise but once again they over twice as expensive as the PCX150's.
So with all that said I would give the PCX150 a buy recommendation if you are interested in a cheaper pair of noise cancelling headphones. Sennheiser is a good name and for the price you get a pretty good product.
posted @ Wednesday, November 07, 2007 8:53 PM