Sony
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What decides the choice
Active noise cancellation works by playing the inverse of the sound reaching a microphone. That is easy for steady, low-frequency noise — an aircraft cabin, a train, a fan — and hard for anything sudden or high-pitched, which is why a colleague’s voice cuts through a jet engine that the headphones erase entirely.
The practical consequence is that a single decibel figure on a box tells you very little without a frequency attached to it. A pair that removes thirty decibels at 100 Hz and six at 2 kHz is a superb flight headphone and a mediocre office one, and both facts hide behind the same headline number.
What you can compare honestly is published: battery life with cancellation switched on, weight in grams, Bluetooth version and codec support. Read the battery figure with its condition attached — the same headphone can quote thirty hours on one codec and twenty-six on another, or twenty-four hours with a feature off and eighteen with it on. Clamping force would be the most useful comfort specification of all, and no major manufacturer publishes it; weight is the closest proxy you can actually check.
Passive isolation — the seal of the earcup — does the work cancellation cannot, and it is the part that degrades. Pads harden, the seal breaks, and performance falls long before the battery does. Budget for a pad replacement around year three, and check that the maker sells them separately before you buy.
Codec support matters less than forum threads suggest and more than nothing. It depends on your source device, and no codec repairs a badly mastered recording. Treat it as a tiebreaker between two pairs you already like, not as a reason to choose one.