hardware

any good recs on the best headset with mic noise cancelling? i want to feel confident taking calls from anywhere this year

hot take: today's noise cancelling processing—whether via H1/H2 chips in airpods or apps like zoom or discord—is what make calls unintelligible. a moderate level of background noise is tolerable when it's a constant pattern, whereas noise cancelling often makes this pattern stochastic as it analyzes and responds in real time.

the superior mic is actually your MBP (or MBA) despite its lack of aggressive noise cancelling, unless you're in an exceedingly loud environment that can actually drown you out.

that said, rtings headphone table sorted by Phone Calls column might be useful:

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that said, rtings headphone table sorted by Phone Calls column might be useful: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tools/table

another way to reframe this is to consider noise in images instead of sound

if you have an image with a relatively consistent level of noise or artifacts (e.g. film grain), even if its distribution is gaussian and not truly even, you will perceive that texture as part of the image. it likely won't bother you and may even lend the image a certain visual quality.

whereas if that same image displays inconsistent or unexpected levels of noise or artifacts (e.g. a large hair or a light leak), you will perceive it as an intrusion or distraction that draws your eye away from the content of the image.

pt 2: https://warpcast.com/matthewb/0x5aef1797

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exactly! often times when recording with any vaguely consumer or prosumer gear, the most time-consuming work is actually disabling all of the noise reduction, echo cancellation, etc. so that you actually have something to work with.

I work on art and design projects that involve sound. Often, sound cancellation software negates my ability to hear remote sound demonstrations as mics attempt to cancel out the “error” that is the sound I want to hear.

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haha yeah exactly, I can easily tolerate a moderate amount of background noise whereas aggressive noise reduction makes it hard to understand wtf people are saying

i have a friend who insists on using airpods pro with a macbook in loud coffee shops with all the zoom background audio removal cranked up and i can’t make out what the fuck he’s saying 40% of the time. same setup over facetime with no tweaks and i can understand him no problem, despite hearing a bit of background noise which is normal

as long as you don’t type it’s the best. voice isolation is impressive though.