staff@slashgear.com (Max Miller)
2024-04-16 10:45:17
www.slashgear.com
Although Apple offers multiple AirPods, only its most premium offerings come with active noise cancellation (ANC), which is probably what most people are thinking of when they use the term “noise cancellation.” Nearly every pair of headphones or earphones on the market offer passive noise cancellation, which simply refers to the physical blockage of your ear canals by the ear cups or ear tips. Active noise cancellation, on the other hand, refers to a technology that uses microphones on the outside of the headphones or earphones to listen to the world around you. Active noise cancelling then uses a tiny computer inside the headphone or earphone to generate what’s called “anti-noise” that has the opposite tones of the noises in your environment. Just as two plus negative two equals zero, noise from your environment plus anti-noise from the headphones combine to create silence.
The only AirPods to feature ANC are the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max, but all generations of those products have the feature. Although the original AirPods first launched in 2016, Apple didn’t add its more premium models to the lineup until 2019 when the company refreshed the original buds and added the AirPods Pro. At time of writing, the models of AirPods Apple sells that have active noise cancellation are the refined AirPods Pro 2nd Generation and AirPods Max 1st Generation (a second generation Max has yet to be released).