Sony MDR-NC500D Review
By Ian Bell
March 04, 2008
We get our hands on the worlds first fully digital noise canceling headphones, the Sony MDR-NC500D. Costing $400, you have to ask yourself just how well they work.
Snip:
"The NC500D offers three different levels of noise cancellation, as well as manual and automatic modes. In manual mode, you press the button marked "AI NC Mode", and one, two, or three beeps tells you which mode you're in. Mode A tailors the frequencies that are blocked to typical airplane noise, really taking the bottom end off of a 747's whine. Mode B blocks noise you'd hear on a bus or train (on the airplane we heard a slight but noticeable increase in engine "whoosh"), while Mode C lightens up cancellation for listening in an office environment. All three modes were still able to make our back-of-the-plane ride more bearable; when we took the headphones off, it sounded like Niagara Falls.
You can enter automatic mode, or AI NC as Sony calls it, by holding the same button until you hear a downward series of notes. (Hold the button until an upward series of tones plays to return to manual mode.) On automatic, you can press the button briefly to engage the headphones' ambient monitoring mode for a few seconds as it determines the appropriate level of noise cancellation for your current environment. This works as advertised, consistently bringing us to the highest level of cancellation on a plane, while putting us in a lower mode for listening at home in relative peace.
An added benefit of the digital design is that the headphones have a very high signal to noise ratio. That means they don’t suffer from the noise that analog noise cancellation circuitry usually introduces into the signal path. When we come across quiet passages in our music, we couldn't hear any noise that wasn't already in the recording."
Read the full Sony MDR-NC500D Review