Silence is golden; screaming children are hell

April 27th, 2017 - Tech

Picked up a pair of noise cancelling headphones recently and life now contains significantly less of the mind-numbing drivel that I’m usually forced to put up with than it did before. Here’s some reasons why they’re a perfect fit for remote working & location independence.

I guess the location that I’m writing this post in is perhaps influencing the amount of vitriol it contains. I’m in Barcelona airport after a short flight from Lagos and I can’t remember getting off a flight as chilled out as I feel right now (admittedly I’m halfway through a beer so that might help).

The headphones in question are Bose’s QuietComfort 20’s:

First, the reasons that these headphones helped with my current state of chill (I think I’ll rate these with chill-factor from now on):

• They cancel noise! Not all the noise, obviously, but a significant amount and, when listening to music, enough to get you past even the noisiest of environments like flights, buses, streets etc.
• The music in my ears sounds good. There’s a teensie bit of background hiss from the noise-cancelling but you can’t hear it at all when music is playing and barely otherwise. And no, in case you haven’t guessed I’m not an “audiowanker”*, but i do like music that sounds not-shit. This music sounds not-shit. In fact it sounds pretty damn well good: good bass for in-ears and the sound quality is more than a match for my old bose over-ears. Which leads me to my next point.
• They’re in-ears! This makes them a butt-load easier to cart around in said plane-like environs and just for general wombling around. I’m not sure how comfy the “control-switch dangly bit”™ would be when exercising (and I’ll likely never know tubs), but for general plodding around town it’s perfectly fine. And not once have the buds felt anything other than suction-cupped into my ear-holes like the worms from The Faculty. It’s awesome. Begone over-ear head-sweat! #oversharer

So, in summary, they are good headphones. I’d go as far as to say that they’re great headphones and, with built in microphone it makes the need for carrying a headset pretty redundant, meaning they’re ideal headphones for nomad-life. I use them daily for calls, travelling, coding and just about every moment of my life that I can in order to block out the monotony of others. Two thumbs up! 👍👍