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Conference Paper

Objective Measurements of Headphone Active Noise Cancelation Performance

Authors: Struck, Christopher J.

AES Conference: 2019 AES INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HEADPHONE TECHNOLOGY · Paper 25 · August 2019

Abstract

Many headphones in the consumer market are currently equipped with an active noise-canceling (ANC) feature. Evaluation of the performance of this feature is not standardized and direct measurement is generally not possible as headphones also naturally provide some amount of passive noise attenuation when worn. Relevant and applicable existing standards are reviewed. Objective performance measures applicable to ANC devices are examined. Measurement methods and data processing techniques are presented. Simple processing of the measured data can reveal the contribution of the passive and active components to the total insertion loss. Examination of the envelope in the time domain can reveal processing artifacts detrimental to speech intelligibility and audio quality. Measurement results are shown for a number of different devices.

Details

Published in
AES Conference: 2019 AES INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HEADPHONE TECHNOLOGY
Paper number
25
Publication date
August 6, 2019
Affiliation
CJS Labs, San Francisco, CA, USA (See document for exact affiliation information.)
Type
Conference Paper