Background

Active noise cancellation technology enables you to shield yourself from the ambient noise. Active noise cancellation headphones are using this technology and enable isolation from any noise in your background. As a result, you are not destructed by the background noise and you can focus on whatever you want to do: listen to music, enjoy a TV show or just taking a peaceful nap.

Can you use active noise cancellation headphones to improve the quality of phone calls? In order to answer this question, let’s drill down to the technology of the active noise cancellation headphones.

Active noise cancellation headphones – technology overview

Active Noise cancellation headphones are equipped with dedicated sensors that are located near your ears. These sensors pick up the ambient noise “a minute” before it reaches your ears. The processor in the headphone immediately generate an audio signal that is opposite from the ambient noise and plays it to your ears.  As a result, the ambient noise is cancelled before it reaches your ears.
Note that if you want to listen to music and you will play it on the loudspeakers;  you will not be able to hear it since the headphones will cancel it like any other ambient noise. Therefore, you have to play the music via your headphones so it will not be picked by the dedicated sensors.

What happens during a phone call?

Whenever you make a call using active noise cancellation headsets, you will not hear your ambient noise but since the active noise cancellation headsets might not shield the microphone; your party might hear your ambient noise and background voices. This might result in very strange scenarios in which you are not aware of your ambient noise while your party can hear it. Your party might even consider this rude.

Therefore, we recommend you should either stop using active noise cancellation headphones during phone calls or make sure you also reduce the ambient noise captured by your microphone. SoliCall offers several noise reduction software products like SoliCall Pro that are suitable for this purpose.