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 We're here at CES 2009, awaiting awesome news from all your favorite headphone manufacturers. Interestingly enough, the first interesting news of the day is only tangentially related to headphones: Sony is introducing a new media player with headphone-independent noise cancellation. That's right, the media player itself will feature active cancellation. We're guessing it'll work the same way as it does in headphones: the device will have a mic, listen in for ambient noise, then output inverse sound waves.
This technology raises a few questions. First of all, what does this mean for active cancellation on headphones? The feature ruins audio quality, gives your headphones a battery dependency, and often means you can't listen to your music without the feature active. If this feature gains popularity, will active cancellation migrate off of headphones and onto devices where it can be better implemented? Further, will the active cancellation focus exclusively on bassy sounds? On the headphones we've reviewed, the active cancellation mainly eliminates lower frequency sound. If the feature doesn't, then will the sound of your pocket fabric rubbing against the mic have an adverse affect on audio quality?
There's a good chance we'll have answers to these questions and more after the Sony press event tonight.
If you want to check out a story on the media player itself, the Sony Walkman NWZ-X1000, check out the article on our sister site, MediaPlayerInfo.com.
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At Sony's press conference we got some info on some of their headphones, but mainly got to check out their new line of bass-boosting headphones. The Sony Extra Bass Headphones, as they are called, consist of the over-ear MDRXB300s, MDRXB500s, and MDRXB700s, and the in-ear MDRXB20EX and MDRXB40EX headphones.
We stopped by the Sennheiser booth tonight at Digital Experience and got to see the HD800s and MX W1s in person. We couldn't listen to either, but maybe – if you guys eat all your vegetables – we could stop by their booth tomorrow to give you our worthless, subjective opinion on how they sound. We did, however, scrounge up some information on each.
At the Monster press event today, they were giving away some freebies of their new $150 headphones, the Turbines. There was a very limited amount, so they were only giving them out to a a select few, super important, ultra handsome journalists. Needless to say, they gave every single one to HeadphoneInfo.com. Our super-strict ethics policy mandates we can't actually keep them, but we will be borrowing them long enough to get them into our lab. What follows is a really precursory review of the Monster Turbines, complete with our utterly subjective opinion of how they sound.