Review: AblePlanet NC200 Noise Canceling Headphones
By bohus
Over the years there have been lots of expensive noise-canceling headphones. The first were invented by Dr. Amar Bose (yes... THAT Bose) in the late 50's, so the tech has been around for a while. I've bought a couple here and there (some from very reputable audio brands, I might add), and they've never really worked. I thought that the noise-canceling dream was just that, seeing as over the years I've never heard one satisfactory example (that I could afford, anyway...).
AblePlanet sent us a pair of their NC200 headphones to try out. My trip to Magfest on a noisy plane was the perfect testing ground. The NC200's come in a cloth bag, and the headphones themselves have a matte neoprene finish. Some clever hinges collapse the headphones to a roughly fist-sized ball – I was able to fit the NC200 bundle into a coat pocket. The replaceable cord is over 6ft long (with inline volume control) and terminates to an 1/8” connection, and AblePlanet includes a 1/4” adapter.
On the plane I was interested in listening to both my cheapie MP3 player and a movie on my laptop. Slipping the headphones on, the external sound was already reduced since the NC200 has fully padded earcups. The fidelity was very good, even without the noise-canceling circuitry activated (a unique feature that these 'phones still work even when the battery for the noise-canceling system goes flat). Snapping it on raised the volume of the incoming sound, and dropped out almost all of the plane's drone. It was eerie in a way. When you take off the 'phones, you can see the little holes outside each earcup. These are the microphones that pick up the outside noise and cancel it out.
I don't normally like inline volume controls (A couple times I thought my output device wasn't providing enough juice until I remembered to turn up the NC200's own volume), they always seem to weigh down the cord and get caught in inconvenient spots. This particular example has a clip for securing the volume control to clothing, and that helped a lot.
As I said, after trying many pairs of noise canceling headphones, AblePlanet's NC200 'phones were the first that I found to actually work. I feared that this performance would come at a price, but the NC200 is on sale right now on Amazon for around $60, which is about what you'd expect to pay for a regular set of high quality phones. My only complaint is the inline volume control, but that's just my personal preference. So after all these years, it's been rewarding to hear someone deliver on the promise of working noise-canceling technology. Now if I could only tune out the exact frequency of the chattering ninnies next to me on the airplane, we'd really have something.
