r/mildlyinfuriating • u/BiteInfamous • 10h ago

I'm slightly vexed Taxi driver wearing noise cancelling headphones while driving in the city

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Look I’m PMSing so I’m admittedly in a very nit picky time of my life. But. Don’t love weaving in and out of traffic in a major city while the taxi driver has noice cancelling headphones on. The sound is loud enough I can hear whatever (moderately funny) comedy show he’s listening to in the backseat. This is ill advised, yes?

ETA thanks to everyone who taught me about transparent mode today :)

ETA2 : Okay, I’m the asshole, comments have shown me there’s lots that could be going on with the driver to make him need to use these and there’s way he could do so safely. Mea culpa. That’ll teach me to knee jerk react.

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34

u/Literatelady 10h ago

Is this is the right time to mention I am disappointed by my premium headphones lack of ability to block noise? On the subway I feel like the background noise is competing with my audiobook or music. However I don't blast music.

9

u/mymotherthemountain 9h ago

Yes, I hate my Bose Quiet Comforts. The noise canceling blocks nothing. 

6

u/Eqmuraj 7h ago

Are they broken? I bought a pair of QC Ultras for a long international flight last year, and the difference between Quiet and immersion vs aware is massive.

2

u/mymotherthemountain 7h ago

No idea, I can hear the difference between the modes, but none seem to actually block/cancel sound. I can hear keyboard typing in all modes. I feel like they block sound purely by the volume of the music. 

3

u/costinmatei98 5h ago

You are 100% doing something wrong / don't have them on your head properly.

I have had my Bose QC35 IIs and QC Ultras for quite a bit now and they are absolutely amazing at blocking out everything. To a point where my friend was shouting at me from my doorway and I was 5 meters away completely unaware.

Though it does work A LOT better when you are playing music / a podcast. Just having them on doesn't work that amazingly, but they still block out most repetitive sounds.

2

u/raybreezer 6h ago

IDK, I literally put mine on without playing sound just to drown out noise sometimes. I would get them checked.

1

u/MC_Naparm 3h ago

They gotta be broken, access the app and play with the settings on the modes and put the noise cancellation to 100%

1

u/mymotherthemountain 2h ago

I've done this before and I can hear the sound mode change, but it doesn't really seem to actually have a meaningful impact on the outside sound levels. I'm kind of at the point where the Bose headphones were just an expensive experiment that didn't work out.

1

u/MC_Naparm 2h ago

I’m thinking yours are a defective pair, when you have the cancelling on max and in a quiet room, snap your fingers, you should barely be able to hear it

1

u/Johnny-Virgil 1h ago

Generally the way they work is to pick up whatever external ambient noise there is in the microphone, reverse the waveform and play it back in your headphones so the waveforms cancel each other out. The more droning the sound you are trying to block, the better they work. A jet engine, a lawnmower, an air conditioner will be blocked easily. Random noises, traffic, horns, gunfire, etc. are all really fast and percussive and when there are a lot of them happening at once, reversing the sound waves quick enough to cancel them is difficult so you still hear them.