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Written by: Brent Butterworth

Created: 01 September 2019

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After writing in-depth about noise canceling for several years, I thought I knew most of what there was to know about it. But at this week’s 2019 Audio Engineering Society International Conference on Headphone Technology in San Francisco, I saw two presentations that changed my thinking about noise-canceling technology in headphones -- and proposed ways to improve the technology and our methods of evaluating it.

Read more: Noise Canceling Is Much More Complicated Than We Thought

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Written by: Brent Butterworth

Created: 01 August 2019

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Running measurements of speakers and headphones on a regular basis teaches you many things about audio that you’d probably never otherwise learn, but it has a side benefit I haven’t seen discussed: it lets you monitor your hearing. The tests, which involve tones played through the devices under test, typically start at the high frequencies and run down to the low frequencies, and as your hearing degrades with age, you see more and more numbers tick away on the display before you can start to hear the tones.

Read more: How Does Aging Affect Audio Perception?

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Written by: Brent Butterworth

Created: 01 July 2019

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It never fails. Write an article about noise-canceling headphones for a mainstream publication, as my colleague Geoff Morrison did for The New York Times, and you’ll hear from readers about a variety of “hacks” for doing noise-canceling with better fidelity and/or for less money and/or to eliminate the dreaded phenomenon of eardrum suck. The most common suggestion is to use earplugs in conjunction with standard passive headphones. Others suggest using high-quality earphones and putting noise-canceling (or passive) headphones over them.

Read more: Noise-Canceling Headphones for 17 Cents?

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Written by: Brent Butterworth

Created: 01 June 2019

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Binaural recordings -- which use microphones placed inside simulated ears on a dummy head -- produce an uncannily realistic sense of space when heard through headphones. But because binaural recordings tend to sound only so-so when heard through speakers, most record labels and engineers don’t release them. For the last couple of years, Chesky Records has produced almost all of its recordings in the Binaural+ format, and I use them in all of my headphone reviews. So when I recently got a press release from Chesky touting Jazz, the latest release from bassist/singer Casey Abrams, recorded “using our new recording methodology which features a stereo ribbon microphone,” I worried that this golden era of binaural recording was over.

Read more: Is Chesky Dumping Binaural?

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Written by: Brent Butterworth

Created: 01 May 2019

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I got a surprising phone call a couple of weeks ago from a fellow audio writer working on an earphone review. He doesn’t review a lot of headphones or earphones, and didn’t know what to make of the latest review sample he’d received. “They have no bass at all. None. I don’t get it,” he said. I happen to have discussed this issue a few years ago with the manufacturer of these earphones, who told me, “I have a lot of customers who want that sound.” I’ve battled online with a few of them, who insist that headphones and earphones with elevated treble have more detail. I advised my colleague to write one of those “If this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like this” reviews for which the old Stereo Review was notorious.

Read more: Why My Fi Ain't Hi-Fi