The performance of active noise-canceling headphones in different noise environments

The performance of active noise-canceling (ANC) headphones is typically determined in pink noise and expressed in terms of insertion loss (IL) curves. However, these curves may not be consistent with the actual noise environments. The aim of this study is to assess the performance of several commercial ANC headphones by comparing performance curves under different noise conditions with the respective IL curves obtained in pink noise. The results indicated that the passive performance remained consistent under different noise conditions. In contrast, the active performance diminished based on the noise environment, brand, and active noise controller. The decrease in performance was especially significant in highly transient events and resulted in a noise amplification extending to 20.4 dB. Therefore, the deviation between results of headphones tested in actual noise environments and those tested in pink noise strongly suggests that it is necessary to consider actual noise environments in future studies to obtain a more accurate evaluation of ANC headphones.