If you only own one pair of headphones, noise-canceling earbuds are the baseline. Thanks to their pocketable designs and ability to suppress environmental sounds or invite them in with tiny exterior microphones, these buds can be your everything headphones, and I’ve worn them everywhere, from transatlantic flights and bustling cafés to lush forest hikes in the Pacific Northwest.
Nearly any pair of modern earbuds with active noise canceling (ANC) can give you a decent experience. But if you want something that will last—and that you’ll actually want to use—it’s worth investing in a quality pair. There’s a staggering number of options, and my colleagues and I have tested nearly all of them. These are the best of their trade, each one hand-picked for its specialized skill set. Whether you’re a die-hard Apple user, a budget buyer, or anything in between, there’s a pick for you below.
For more choices, check out our Best Noise-Canceling Headphones (which includes non-earbuds), Best Cheap Headphones, and Best Workout Headphones guides.
What Is Noise Canceling and How Does It Work?
Active noise canceling (ANC) uses a mix of passive sound isolation (blocking your ears), exterior microphones, and software to suppress environmental sounds before they reach your eardrums. The process, which has been refined since the late 1970s, involves sampling the sounds around you in real time (up to tens of thousands of times per second) and then neutralizing them.
To understand the process, we have to dig a little into physics. Sound moves through the air as pressure waves that eventually hit your eardrums. The frequency of a wave is the number of times it oscillates per second, and frequency determines pitch. So we perceive a low-frequency wave, like from an airplane rumble, as a dull bass sound. And a high-frequency wave, like from a siren or a yapping dog, we hear as a sharp treble sound.
What noise-canceling systems do is they perceive the frequency of a sound wave and instantly generate a polar opposite waveform: When one wave is at its peak, the other will be at its trough, and vice versa. Adding those waves together, they zero each other out, as if there is no wave at all.
The difficulty is that there are often many sounds at once, and each contains a mix of different frequencies, so it’s hard to quell all the sounds in your environment. But through a combination of faster processing, better microphones, and effective blocking of our ear canals, the latest earbuds and headphones are getting impressively close.
What Is Transparency Mode or Ambient Sound Mode?
Transparency mode (sometimes called ambient sound mode) aims for the opposite effect of noise canceling. Instead of neutralizing or canceling sound around you, this feature filters environmental sounds into the speakers of your earbuds or headphones, blending it with your music or other audio source. Cheaper versions often sound muffled or sharp, but buds like Apple’s AirPods Pro have gotten so good at recreating sounds captured by their exterior microphones, it can almost feel like you’re not wearing earbuds at all.
One major limitation of transparency mode is the small microphones used to capture the sound, which can easily be blocked or distorted by wind or other interference. You may have tried to use transparency mode while riding your bike or ebike, only to find the wind pressure creates an unlistenable blast of sound. This is where open earbuds can be a great alternative. Instead of microphones, the best open earbuds simply keep your ear canals naturally open, while delivering satisfying sound from outside your ear canal. I love open earbuds for all kinds of use cases, but for most situations, transparency mode from traditional noise-canceling earbuds will suffice.
What’s In a Charging Case?
Nearly all wireless earbuds, noise-canceling or otherwise, come with a charging case. The simple reason? The buds are very small, so they don’t have space for the large batteries found in over-ear wireless headphones, which often offer 30 to 40 hours of playback time or more per charge so you can take them off the grid. A charging case not only provides a safe place to keep your buds so they don’t get lost or covered in lint, but it also allows for multiple recharges to extend the time you can step away from power sources and still keep your tunes rolling.
How We Test Noise-Canceling Earbuds
Here at WIRED, my colleagues and I test all headphones, including noise-canceling headphones, the way you use them. We wear them over multiple weeks to test their comfort, battery life, and the convenience and accessibility of their onboard controls. We listen to random tunes, podcasts, and videos, but also curated playlists full of music we’ve heard dozens of times.
For me, that means samples from the Beatles, Radiohead, Fleetwood Mac, Beck, Nickel Creek, Snarky Puppy, Frank Sinatra, Depeche Mode, Anderson .Paak, and many more. Each of us has our own list, but the common factor is an array of genres to confirm how they work for all types of listeners. Whenever possible we take time to test lossless or high-resolution sound codecs with supported devices, and I use Spotify Lossless as my main streaming source.
For testing noise canceling, my colleague Parker Hall and I both take the earbuds out into the world, testing them for sounds from lawnmowers, vacuums, construction sites, traffic, and other local sounds, including their transparency and noise-canceling modes. Because we’re both audio producers, we also take them into our acoustically treated home studios, where we test their noise canceling against AirPlane drone demos, vocal chatter, and white or pink noise played through studio monitors. When possible, I also take any earbuds I’m testing on long trips and flights to see how they react to real-world environments. The goal is to wear these earbuds out to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.