Raucous laughter, babies crying, someone coughing up a lung—the joys of air travel. I'm thankful for my plush neck pillow and face mask to keep my senses dulled to what's around me when I fly, though nothing has made as great a difference as my noise cancelling headphones. The Bang & Olufsen Beoplay Portal are my blocker of choice, as they're the most effective at reducing outside noise and jet turbine rumble to the bare minimum. So, you might be surprised to hear my rally against noise cancelling headphones for gaming, but let me explain.
Active noise cancelling (ANC) is when the headset uses microphones and onboard processing to counteract outside interference. It's quite literally cancelling the noise out with an equal and opposite soundwave. There are multiple types of ANC: feed-forward, which uses a microphone outside the device to pickup external noise; and feed-back, which listens closely to what's happening closer to the listener's ear canal to more accurately counteract what's actually seeping in. The best systems often use a combination of both and adapt how they use each technology for better results. That's what the Beoplay Portal offers, so it's a great example of what ANC can offer, especially for travelling the globe.
I use a different pair of noise-cancelling headphones at home on my gaming PC: SteelSeries' Arctis Nova Pro. These offer hot-swappable batteries and, in effect, infinite battery life. That was their main draw for me using them, though the 4-mic ANC had seemed a net benefit even in my relatively quiet office. And indeed it has: some distractions seem less so for wearing them, if I remember to turn ANC on.
Both the Beoplay and Nova Pro cancel out persistent noise best. Spiky, inconsistent sound won't be removed anywhere near as well, as has always been the case with any ANC I've tried. The roar of a jet turbine, the whirr of a desk fan, or the sound of a gaming laptop trying its best to stay cool—all easily removed. Where things get trickier is with the sounds of humans talking, a doorbell, or the sound of music or TV played at any considerable volume elsewhere. ANC does not deal with these particularly well. A kid screaming three seats away on a long-haul flight tends to seep through the algorithm.
After spending the last week testing a gaming laptop, I was reminded how important it can be to keep a pair of noise-blocking headphones close at hand. The Alienware 16 Area-51 isn't a particularly loud machine, though it will still sound like an alien invasion is kicking off outside while running Cyberpunk 2077 on maximum ray-traced mode if you don't wear some ear protection.
You know what has a more universal ability? sound isolation. Rather than cancel out any unwanted noise, this is the means of blocking any soundwaves reaching your ears whatsoever. It's passive, rather than active, requiring no significant technology in the earcup, relying instead on solid design and materials to reach the desired effect.
Never has the difference between active noise cancellation and passive sound isolation been so stark than in my recent testing of the Audeze LCD-S20 Closed-Back headphones.
Where some audio slips through the net with ANC, very little squeaks through the variable brick wall of the LCD-S20. Of all the headphones I wear around the house—as someone that tests them for a living, that's a lot—it's only the LCD-S20 that allow my partner to unintentionally jumpscare me by walking up to my desk. Not any of the active ANC headphones or earbuds (did I mention the Liberty 4 Pro I use on my exercise bike and often out of the house have ANC, too?); nope, the completely passive pair.
That is, in part, thanks to the LCD-S20's closed-back design. There's more to good sound isolation than earcup construction alone, as I'll get to shortly, but it's worth considering the differences in closed-back and open-back headphones if you're looking for a pair of headphones to block out the world. There's a world of difference here.
A closed-back headset is fairly self-explanatory: it's a headset with no vents, grill, or mesh on the rear of the earcup, fully encasing the driver within. This, in turn, keeps soundwaves bouncing around inside the headset. This has a few benefits and drawbacks. The main benefit is greater sound isolation (most of the time), and less leakage. That means anyone in close proximity doesn't have to hear your latest music obsession (Bilmuri anyone?). The drawback is that, arguably (and I will argue this to the bitter end) open-back is better in literally every other way.
But we're talking about blocking out the outside world here. Open-back is truly dreadful at that. The LCD-S20's might lose out on the expansive and airy tone for their closed-back design, one that looks like an LA observatory on either ear, but they don't let a decibel in or out.
We're used to closed-back headphones in the world of gaming headsets—few are open-back—though in the world of high-end audiophile headsets and, specifically, planar magnetic cans, the LCD-S20's closed-back design has it stick out like a sore thumb. So, you'd think that gaming headsets would share the isolating properties of the LCD-S20. Yet they rarely do. And more often get nowhere close.
I'd chalk this up to the other important factors in designing noise isolating headphones: choice of earpads and earcup design. The LCD-S20, like many planar magnetic cans, are huge and heavy. The earcups don't sit on the ear, they fully envelope it—providing you don't have massive ears. The earcups are made from a leatherette-like cloth with "acoustic dampening", and importantly seem to be plush enough to keep a firm hold of your head. Where gaming headsets falter by comparison is in their thinner, sometimes brandished as 'breathable', earcups, which let a lot more noise in as a result. Great for wicking away moisture from sweaty gamers, less so keeping noise out.
A headset needs to be designed from the ground up for sound isolation for top results, even if you can jury-rig new pads onto a headset with varying success. That's probably why gaming headsets with improved earcups and ANC still don't really square up to the real deal. Perhaps it's unfair to compare cheaper gaming headsets with other priorities to Audeze's $500 planar magnetic cans specifically created for sound isolation. After all, gaming headset do offer a lot of features, try to do it all and without wires, in a pretty affordable package versus some high-end headphones. So I will cut them some slack here.
But we shouldn't forget Razer, Steelseries and others throw ANC on their premium gaming headsets—like the Blackshark V3 Pro and aforementioned Nova Pro—with the sole intention of cutting out distractions. Neither of those examples do a spectacular job. As Dave points out in his Blackshark V3 Pro review, the ANC has a tough time of blocking much due to a lack of passive sound isolation. Both ANC solutions are easily beaten in my estimations through better design and choice of materials.
So, if gaming headsets are serious about cutting out unwanted noise, I'd like to see a shift from a reliance on ANC to an entirely new design philosophy. That doesn't necessarily mean ditching ANC entirely. Some get it right, like the AceZone A-Spire, and there's no doubt it makes for a huge improvement on travel-friendly earbuds—the Audeze LCD-S20 and Maxwells are not portable enough for travelling around the globe with. Though too often it feels like an easy addition to hit a new premium price point on a dedicated gaming headset and without much consideration for making it genuinely good.
1. Best overall:
HyperX Cloud Alpha
2. Best budget:
Corsair HS55 Stereo
3. Best wireless:
Razer BlackShark V3
4. Best mid-range wireless:
Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 3
5. Best audiophile:
Beyerdynamic MMX 330 Pro
6. Best wireless audiophile:
Audeze Maxwell
7. Best for streaming:
Audio-Technica ATH-M50xSTS StreamSet
8. Best noise-cancelling:
AceZone A-Spire
9. Best earbuds:
Steelseries Arctis GameBuds
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