I have a pair of Bose QC20s which are (or were, when I bought them) state of the art for noise canceling, and have a 3.5mm headphone jack. No app required and they even work as normal wired headphones if the battery goes flat.

Same with the Sony WH1000 xm3. The only thing missing when working wired is the microphone, but I basically never use that anyway.

The problem with the wire, at least the provided one, is that it's pretty stiff so it picks up a lot of noise and the plug doesn't lock to the headphone side so I'm not sure how well it would hold during prolonged usage. But the plug is standard, so at least the cable can be changed easily.

This is a good point. Last I looked at the reviews, those were still state of the art for noise cancelling, if only because wired in-ears also have nice sound isolation. I should dust mine off...

Have there been large advances in noise cancelling since 3.5mm jacks started to disappear?

Maybe not.

But if you want to buy headphones today with NC, most of them will be wireless.

I’ve had the best heat headphones Bose has to offer in the Quiet Comfort series and to me this “state of the art noise cancellation” sounds like artefact- and distortion-inducing noise.

I’ve returned them and replaced them with much better, naturally damping, closed head-phones. And the audio is so much better, at a fraction of the cost.

Noise cancellation in the hifi-space is just snake oil, and I’m not having it.

Does... does anyone actually think noise-cancelling is for increasing audio quality? I always thought it was just for handling obnoxiously noisy environments, like airplanes, screaming children, etc.

Aside, but noise cancelling (at least what's currently on the market) doesn't really do much for screaming children. It only handles relatively constant noise well, ideally low/mid-frequency constant noise. Great at silencing stuff like airplane engines, wind, HVAC hum, freeway rumble, etc. But not very effective for people talking, crying babies, car horns, ambulance sirens, slamming doors, etc.

Interesting. I thought there was at least good noise cancelling for shooting/hunting.

That’s an entirely different kind of noise cancellation than you find in most “regular” headsets.

It just blocks/reverses sudden sharp, loud noises (shots). It will let normal speech and such (and pretty much everything else) right through.

> Does... does anyone actually think noise-cancelling is for increasing audio quality?

No, but noise cancelling headsets are often sold as premium headsets, with the obvious implication that they are to have high sound-quality. And quite often, they don’t.

No one who's thinking through how it works, which is by picking up the ambient noise and then modifying the output to include the inverse on top of whatever you're listening to.

Noise cancelling works quite well on planes.

It's not for hi-fi. Livable-fi in combination with noise cancellation is a bonus. The headphones are for noise cancellation, not hi-fi.

(These cans are usually not too bad with noise cancellation turned off. But when you turn it on, it's because noise cancellation is what you want.)