Active Noise-Canceling (ANC) headphones have become an essential accessory for daily commuting and outdoor activities. Their noise-canceling function enhances the listening experience, allowing users to focus more on music or voice communication. However, with varying usage scenarios and environmental noise conditions, can ANC headphones truly deliver the expected performance? Allion Labs is here to explore the truth!
Beware! Your Validation Methods May Lack Environmental Realism
Traditionally, ANC headphones are evaluated using White/Pink Noise and microphones embedded in acoustic mannequins. However, the most significant flaw of this approach is that White/Pink Noise represents a steady noise, which cannot reflect the ever-changing real-world noise. While headphone manufacturers understand this limitation, they often lack the manpower, time, and resources to perform field tests in various actual environments to compensate for this shortfall.
Understanding clients’ needs for scenario simulation, Allion Labs’ acoustic consulting team uses professional acoustic equipment and engineers to record real environmental noise from various scenes, including stations, airports, offices, buses, and high-speed trains. These recordings are then faithfully and consistently reproduced in the lab as the environment for noise cancellation validation. This is paired with objective testing methods defined by ETSI EG 202 396-3, using professional voice quality evaluation systems to assess noise cancellation performance.
Ambient Noise Sound Field Restoration Test Lab | Allion Labs
How to Faithfully and Consistently Reproduce Soundstage Environments?
To faithfully and consistently simulate the complete actual environment, professional acoustic engineers are deployed with specialized recording equipment to the space, ensuring that environmental conditions meet the validation design before conducting multiple recordings to capture different noise scenarios. Back in the lab, these recordings are played back using Allion Labs’ proprietary “Soundstage Reproduction Technology,” which has been honed through years of experience by the acoustic consulting team, offering clients the best soundstage reproduction solution.
Although the steps may seem simple, executing them requires significant expertise. Allion Labs has invested over 15 million TWD in equipment and acoustic environments, along with a team of experienced acoustic engineers, to create high-value environment simulations! When issues are identified, problem analysis and troubleshooting can be conducted in the same environment without being affected by weather conditions, saving substantial investment, manpower, and time costs by eliminating the need for repeated manual testing!
Soundstage Reproduction Validation More Effectively Verifies Noise-Canceling Performance
To give readers a better understanding of real-world performance, we measured and validated two ANC headphones, showing how each performs in terms of noise cancellation and voice quality playback in a coffee shop environment.
G-MOS scores represent overall sound quality, with higher scores being better.
From the data measured above, after analysis, the following conclusions can be drawn in a coffee shop environment:
- In low-background noise environments, whether ANC is on or off makes little difference.
- Both headphones showed improved G-MOS scores after turning on ANC in noisy environments, with Headphone A improving sound quality by 11% (3.5 -> 3.9) and Headphone B by 8% (3.7 -> 4.0).
- Without background noise, both headphones had similar sound quality (4.36 vs. 4.32), but with background noise and ANC on, Headphone A’s sound quality decreased by about 10% (4.36 -> 3.9), while Headphone B’s sound quality only decreased by about 7% (4.32 -> 4.0).
- Overall, Headphone B provided better noise suppression and superior sound quality.
Time to Market with Quality! High-Quality Service to Create Value for You
Faster, Easier, Better! Allion Labs’ Acoustic Consulting Team
From the real-world case studies above, you can see that good product design must consider the user’s application scenarios. For headphones, this includes considering noise-canceling performance and voice communication quality in different noise environments.
With Allion Labs’ environmental noise soundstage reproduction service, combined with evaluation systems that meet ETSI standards, we provide you with Faster, Easier, and Better solutions, enabling you to identify potential audio performance issues during the design and testing phases. Based on the data results, you can improve your product, offering highly competitive products in the market!
If you have any questions or requirements, please contact us.