Best over-ear noise-cancelling headphones?

I find AirPods Max uncomfortable.

🕯️They/them. Scaled cos from 0-$300k in arr, 7-35 employees, 0-100k users. Now I make candles that give people love, joy, and delight at humankind.place

there’s no perfect recco, headphones (and speakers) are quite personal and always involve compromises.

AirPods Max (APM for short) are actually very good headphones overall with relatively neutral tuning and decent detail retrieval. I like their low-end response quite a bit. the only downside for me is that they’re heavy as hell and uncomfortable for 3hr+ sessions.

a bit generic but I would give the Sony XM5 and Bose QuietComfort Ultra a try and see how you feel vs. APM. my guess is that you’ll find both more comfortable (mainly less heavy) and you might prefer the sound of one or the other. doubtful either will be higher performance, just different.

I’d recommend choosing a set of tracks that you’ve heard a million times, and listening to the same tracks on whichever models you compare. if you listen to random tracks on each, you might confuse yourself rather than drawing useful conclusions. taking notes is also helpful rather than relying on memory.

on the “consumer” side, I’m personally not a fan of headphones like Beats since they are tuned with a strong “smiley” EQ, tipped up at both the low and high end of their frequency response. that said, some people really dig it, so worth a try.

on the “hi-fi” side, my personal favs are Focal Bathys wireless headphones. they are a notable notch above APM in sound quality and quite a bit more comfortable. the main downside is that they’re even more expensive than APM ($1000?). there’s a new Bathys Mg model that is a notch higher ($1500?) and allegedly better still.

anyway, hope this helps a bit 💜

I wrote a little bit about headphones over at @samantha's thread, could go deeper though if needed:

I wrote a little bit about headphones over at @samantha's thread, could go deeper though if needed:

https://farcaster.xyz/matthewb/0xe291c57a

writing about products & protocols on Farcaster | prev. Juicebox, Nouns, RAW DAO | casting about coffee, hi-fi, and other rabbit holes

have you tried B&W Px8s?
senheisser have anything good these days?

goddamnit now i want an aiaiai and getting ads again for them 
ugh

have you tried the aiaiais? 
i'm actually not sure they have a noise canceling now but just curious 

i always liked the aesthetics and the idea of modularity but never dared

I haven't heard any recent Sennheiser's since the pair I had in high school. they have a line of noise cancelling over-ear and earbuds called Momentum. probably solid.

I tried the PX8 in the same couple days as the Mark Levinson No 5909, Focal Bathys, and B&O H100. I really wanted to like either the PX8 or H100 because damn, they're beautiful. headphones are lifestyle objects to some extent, so this is a factor for me.

from a purely performance-based assessment, the Bathys was the best performer. I'm quite picky with bass/low-end response and the Bathys was by far the best there with APM as an uncomfortably heavy runner-up.

PX8 was good though, no complaints. certainly nothing wrong with it. would recommend listening to a set of test tracks and comparing with other options. H100 was also pretty good, slightly better than the PX8 and more tuning options via app. killer expensive though.

the Levinson 5909 were perhaps my least favourite. very analytical and tuned ruler flat, just painfully drab unless you were listening exclusively to classical music.