I will be doing a good amount of international travel in a month and have been looking for some headphones in the $300ish range with solid ANC. I have a pair of AirPods Pro, and they are just alright on flights as far as ANC goes, and I don’t want to deal with charging them every few hours.
I went around to multiple local Best Buys to try out the Bose QC45, Sony XM4, and Sony XM5, and was honestly very disappointed. All three of them only had a tiny change between ambient mode and ANC mode. I also had the same experience with a pair of Bose 700s in all ANC modes. I could still clearly hear customer and employee conversations going on around the store, and I could hear my partner talking next to me, all with none of the demo music playing. I tried out my AirPods Pro immediately after each one and was able to cut out significantly more noise. This experience was the same at each of the Best Buys I went to, and I went to multiple hoping that the first Best Buy just had broken demo units maybe.
One of the Best Buys had a pair of Airpods Max to try, those also cut out significantly more noise.
I have seen nothing but praise for how good the ANC is on all of these Bose and Sony headphones, I would expect them to at least be as good as AirPods, I have tried a family member’s XM3s a few years ago and was absolutely blown away by how good the ANC was. Do these demo units just suck? I don’t really want to spend $300 just to find out, but I cannot think of another reason.
It depends what part of the frequency range you’re comparing. E.g. WH1000XM4 vs Airpod Pro 2s: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/wh-1000xm4-wireless#test_423
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/apple/airpods-pro-2nd-generation-truly-wireless#test_423WH1000XM4 isolate best at around the 40-50Hz region, Airpod Pros do much better than the Sonys in the mid range region where voices predominantly are
My advice: stick with your Airpod Pros. I dont think any over ear ANC options will be a worthwhile use of your money and many will have worse sound quality
The main benefit for me at least is comfort. I would not want to be on an airplane for many hours with in-ears (I have XM4)
The ANC on my AirPods Pros recently stopped working right again. I’ve RMA’d them a few times and they are out of warranty now. I’m definitely not buying another pair from Apple. Even when they worked perfectly they were not that great.
