Sounds of silence
If you're sick of the hassle and expense of the morning drive to work, consider a nice, quiet ride on the subway. It's surprisingly peaceful down there, with soft music and the gentle clatter of the rails.
Of course, the subway only sounds this good if you're riding with a portable music player and a set of noise-canceling headphones. These gadgets deliver clear, clean sound while blocking out the uglier noises of the world.
Sound reaches our ears as a mass of analog waves, like ripples in a pool of water. These sound waves can be canceled out by a speaker that instantly generates the opposite sound waves. But headphones must do this without interfering with the sounds you want to hear, such as an opera or the latest Top-40 tunes.
It's a big technical challenge to get it right. But the engineers at Bose Corp. in Framingham figured it out nearly 20 years ago, when the company introduced noise-canceling headphones for military and commercial aircraft pilots. By 2000, Bose started making them for ordinary consumers, in time for Apple Inc.'s 2001 release of the original iPod portable music player. The iPod craze has inspired better-quality headphones from a host of vendors, many of them with noise-cancellation technology. I've been using four of them - three traditional wrap-around headsets and a pair of earbuds - and I generally like what I've heard.
At $300, Sennheiser Electronic Corp.'s PXC 350 was the least expensive of the headset models. Weighing 8 ounces, it was also the bulkiest. It's not exactly heavy, but feels like it, with huge cups that encase the ears like a couple of beer steins. Even the attached cable is thicker than usual, but it sports a welcome volume control knob.
The PXC 350 did a decent job for me during a couple of Red Line commutes. I picked iPod tracks that might be tough hearing in a tunnel - a podcast on ancient history and some tangos by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla. While the Sennheiser didn't deaden noise as well as some of its rivals, the worst of the din died away, leaving me to revel in Latin dance tunes and Roman politics.
Unlike its rivals, the PXC 350 is powered by two AAA batteries, one in each earcup. That means you don't have to plug in the headphones to recharge them, a potential nuisance on long trips. And if the batteries die, you lose the noise-cancellation feature, but can still listen to music. By contrast, the other headsets were useless without battery power.
Still, Sony Electronics Corp.'s $400 MDR-NC500D was quite attractive when charged up. It weighs a shade under 7 ounces, and its thin cord and compact earpieces make it considerably more portable than the PXC 350. It's also better at canceling out background noise. Sony is touting the NC500D as the first digital noise-canceling headphone. It uses a chip to analyze background sounds and select one of three cancellation profiles - for air travel, bus and subway trips, or working at the office.
I tried all three in various noisy settings, and while I could hear the difference, it hardly mattered. I was able to tune out the world in all three modes.
I was even more impressed by another Sony product, MDR-NC22, priced at a mere $100. These are earbuds that don't wrap padded cups around your ears, but the darn things work. No, they don't cut outside noise as thoroughly as their bigger, costlier rivals, but they come surprisingly close.
The buds come with three sizes of earpieces. Pick one that matches the size of your ear canal, and the buds act like little earplugs, blocking out a good deal of ambient noise. The noise-canceling circuit, powered by a single AAA battery, wipes out most of the rest. Too bad it replaces the noise with a faint hiss of white noise rather than near-silence. But there's no mucking around with a battery charger, and as with the Sennheiser model, you can listen to music when your battery goes dead. The Sony earbuds weigh just over an ounce and fit in a pocket.
The Sony buds are a good solution for a morning commute. But for a long plane ride, I would favor the $350 QuietComfort 3, the latest model from Bose. It weighs just 5.6 ounces, and doesn't cup the ears; the earpieces rest against the ears. But Bose has come up with a padding material that conforms well to the shape of the ear. The phones block out noise almost as well as earcups, but with greater comfort.
The noise cancellation is excellent, too; at least as good as the Sony headset. In addition, the Bose headset delivers deeper bass tones than the other models. It's a mixed blessing; a little too rich for that Roman history podcast, but just the thing for an old Bernard Herrmann movie score.
At a time of economic peril, it seems difficult to justify a pair of $400 headphones, or even $100 for some earbuds. Then again, if you parked your car a couple of times a week, and hopped a bus or train instead, think what you would save. A lot of fuel money certainly. And with good phones and good tunes, a lot of wear and tear on the nerves.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
