Sony MDR-NC11 Headphones

Posted by T3 Online on Mon 29 Oct 2007

In-ear noise-cancellers that don't cost the Earth.

Noise-cancelling earbuds? Surely, it'll never work. That's what we thought before we tried these 'phones. It turned out we were only partially correct.

These fill your ears comfortably, and the active noise cancelling works pretty well, vastly reducing background noise at the flick of a discrete switch on the earphones themselves. Curiously though, when you do hear noise between songs, it sounds like it's coming from the 'phones rather than the outside world.

The �70 price tag is OK, given their sturdy sonic performance. They can't touch the Bose QuietComfort 2s or Panasonic RP-HC300 cans for clarity and range, but the sound is perfectly acceptable for such tiny 'phones.

However, what isn't acceptable is their tendency to pick up interference from mobile phones. We had to rip them out of our ears in pain at one point, and it wasn't because James Blunt came on.