Sennheiser PXC 450 ‘noise-cancelling’ headphones
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
Sennheiser specialise in ‘noise-cancelling’ headphones. That’s headphones that cancel noise. Seems a bit self-defeating really.
Of course I’m being flippant and needlessly stupid. What they actually do is cancel all noise other than the whatever they themselves are producing. They’re dual ear-defenders and headphones.
They’re going to make crossing the road even more hazardous than it already is. They’re going kill you when there’s a fire in your building. They’re going to make you seem like an ignorant person who’s too superior to stop and talk to their friends. Genius.
The press release is wilfully self-important, as press releases are wont to be. Here’s a highlight. Apparently, Sennheiser’s PXC 450 headphones feature a ‘high level of passive ambient noise attenuation thanks to circumaural ear pads’.
They also feature another ingenious mechanism to counteract that whole ‘not hearing cars’ thing I alluded to before. You can flick a switch to permit outside noise. The way this works is that the headphones activate tiny microphones on their exterior and transmit the sound through the ear bits. It’s only a short step from here to people wearing blindfolds with cameras on the outside and TVs on the inside so that they can see the world around them.
The reason for this painfully unnecessary innovation is so that the headphones can continue to filter out all non-essential noise, transmitting only the sound of your friend speaking or whatever. How exactly do they decide what’s essential and what’s non-essential? What happens if the headphones deem the sound of a snarling, escaped tiger ‘non-essential’?
