Customer Ratings & Reviews

Bose are the standard for active noise cancellation. However these Sennheiser units achieve 85% the Bose performance at less than half the price.

First let me state that I love Sennheiser headphones. I have three pair: my original 414s from 30+ years ago, a 965 Ovations and pair of CX 475 earbuds. I am completely sold on Sennheiser, and am a long-time fan. Having said that, these headphones were very disappointing. I originally had a pair of the Rocketfish noise-canceling headphones. They were okay, but I wanted something better, so I swapped them for these Sennheisers. The sound quality was poor and tinny - these phones were more than 4 time the cost of my other Sennheiser earbuds, and they don't have half the sound quality. Sennheisers come with different sized ear pieces to fit different sized ears, and it is important to have proper fit for good bass response. Even with the largest ear pieces, I could not get a good enough fit to get good sound. This is not the case with my other Sennheiser earbuds. The noise reduction was abysmal. I noticed an insignificant amount of reduction on the plane. I returned these when I got home and got the Bose QC 15s. I was doing my best to avoid getting the Bose, and thought for sure Sennheiser would be the way to go, but I was only disappointed.

These earphones have decent passive noise isolation, but the active noise cancellation is pretty weak, and varies a lot depending on fit. What's worse is the volume is pretty low, so you cannot hear music well in a noisy flight. I had to return mine because of these issues, quite disappointed.