I was pretty seriously looking at the QC2's myself, but was ummmming and ahhhhing about the price. They certainly looked a comfortable headphone, but £275? In Aussie they had a 30 day trial offer, but they don't seem to do it here in the UK. And it's one of those things that I think you really do have to try on a plane, you can't get the same impression of the noise cancellation in a store, its a completely different background noise. Plus they looked fairly bulky, not good if you're wanting to travel light and need to stuff them in a backpack.
So I kept looking and found the Sennheiser PXC300's. £129.99 in stores, but if you get searching on the web you can find them for
£89.99 Delivered. A third of the price of the QC2's. Decided that I'd start with these and if I didn't like them then eBay them as they're going for pretty close to that on eBay.co.uk at the moment.
And they're good! Nice and small (smaller earpad then I originally thought they'd be), with a travel case, so you can pop them in your carry-on bags pocket easily, reasonably good sound in a audio-hostile enviroment such as a plane, and should be comfortable to wear for long periods of time. I've only had the opportunity to wear them on an hour and a half flight to Switzerland so far and they were very comfortable. I've got my usual hour 27 hour epic flight home to New Zealand next month so should be able to give them a real test.
The cancellation works, it takes the raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar out of the air conditioning on the plane. You can still hear the lowend of the engines and a slight airconditioning noise, but its reduced a fair amount in the middle frequencies. If you hold the phones hard against your ears it really blocks out everything, if only the band could squeeze together hard enough to do this full time!
I wasn't expecting decent sound on the plane even with the noise cancellation, but you do hear quite a bit more, rather then just the general gist of what you are listening to with normal 'phones. Out and about on the streets you can get some fairly good bass out of them too, certainly more capable then my pair of Sennheiser PMX60's.
Downside is the battery pack that it uses, can get in the way a bit, but if you're just pulling them out of a bag to listen to on a plane rather then in your jeans pocket to walk around town with then its no biggie.
But its the noise cancellation that's the most important feature, and you sit there for a while at first just flicking the power on and off to hear the difference. When I first used them in my office, it completely killed the sound of the airconditioning and was a real 'Holy crap!' moment, but on a plane, the engines and air conditioning were just too overpowering to be fully cancelled out.
I'd like to try some IEM's now for comparison, probably the Shure E4C's, but I'm unsure about the comfort factor for wearing them for 27 hours. But I guess with the money I've saved, I can buy some just for the hell of it, and still have spent less then a pair of QC2's.. .
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