233621 H501 Active Noise Cancelling Over-Ear Headphones with Inline Microphone and Carrying Case, 50 Hour Battery Time (Wired/Space Grey)

EDIT: After using these headphones for a total of about ~40 hours of international flight time, I can recommend these without reservation. They performed flawlessly, cutting cabin noise to almost nothing, and they also allowed me to use my MP3 player without having to turn up the volume above my usual setting. Both the airplane cabin and engine noise were almost completely suppressed while still allowing me to clearly hear in-flight announcements. In short, these are a *great* set of noise cancelling headphones that work extremely well and are priced very affordably. These are as good or better than the Bose headphones which cost 3 or 4 times as much. ----------------------- Wow. Simply put, these are great noise cancelling headphones, well-made and inexpensive. They knock out about 90% of common low-end, cyclical noise like fans, engines, compressors, etc and cost less than a 1/3 of the Bose noise cancelling headphones. I'll be testing these more against some high-end Bose headphones and also on a long airplane trip shortly, but my first impression is that they work very well. Turn them on and everything...just...gets...quiet. Standing next to a refrigerator and turning them on makes it sound like the refrigerator just stopped running. They come in a nice travel case with 2 patch cords, a 1/4" adapter, an airplane adapter, and a battery. The little pouch that holds the cords and stuff detaches from the carrying case so you can put in a bag separately if you don't want to lug the carrying case around. The instructions are a hoot- very spacey. For example, the instructions start off with this little bit of Zen prose: ------------------------------------------ 9,000m in the sky, 7-hour time difference, over 7,000 miles apart. The cabin mix with the travel tiredness and the unique smell, the soul inside the body can finally relax. This moment, rare and precious. Changing a pose and choosing an old song, Put on my headphone. A short rest, for getting rid of the plane roaring, for escaping preciseness and all the worries, finding the real me and this moment of satisfaction, Pursuit of a lifetime, mixed in the hubub and noise, I finally know the meaning of content in calmness, 233621 grants you the best quiet space. Silence is Golden. ------------------------------------------ Lol, what's not to like about that? :) The translation of the directions are a little bit shaky but still completely understandable. Plugging an MP3 player into them results in good, clear sound, no complaints there. The headband seems sturdy and is well-padded and the earcups also seem very comfortable- much better than the "on-ear" style. Two very minor gripes: 1) I wish that the headphone cups would fold in (swivel) to store a little more compactly, but this is a very minor gripe. 2) The audio input jack on my pair is a little loose, but that's probably just this pair. If it gets too loose I'll return them for the exact same model, that's how much I like these so far. All in all, I'm impressed with these and looking forward to using them and putting them up against the $350 Bose headphones. My guess is that there will hardly be any noticeable difference, and I'll update this to let you know what I find. But so far these seems to be an outstanding deal for the money.

H501 Active Noise Cancelling Over-ear Headphones with Inline Microphone and Carrying Case, 50 hour Battery Time (Wired / Space Grey) Every time I fly home and go to college from home, I won’t forget these. I can listen to my songs but won’t hear the annoying ambient noise on flights. Perfect travel companion for me. They are the best headphones I have ever used before within the price of 200 dollars, with excellent noise-cancellation and outstanding audio performance. Also, I really like its user-friendly design and enjoy the extremely comfortable wearing. I was surprised by its noise cancellation which is much better than my initially preferred set (used it for more than three years), and extremely impressed by the detail in the music that I'd not heard before. Impressions and stuff I learned quickly: -Magical noise-cancellation: can let me focus on the music, movies and videos. -Light set- much: lighter than my preferred set before, ear cups can be rotated for a better fit, sits closer to the head, comfortable. -Fantastic sound quality: the mid-low to low frequencies sound pretty well without being overpowered and muddying to high frequencies. I'm not a professional audiophile and only share my experience as a consumer with limited. I love music as well as headphones with good sounding and comfortable wearing. -Sound does leak out but not too bad. Will depend on how loud you play and how tight this fits on your head.

The build quality of these headphones are decent, they are comfortable when worn (I have an average sized head and average sized ears), and the sound quality average (the $20 Sony headphones my kids have sound better). The ANC does a pretty good job cancelling out low sounds; things like an air conditioner running and the lower tones of a persons voice. The ANC does not cancel out the mid or higher tones of a person talking or anything else making mid to high toned noises. While I could have lived with those things, given the price of these, the losing point and reason I am sending these back is the sound leak, or maybe I should say the sound broadcast of the headphones. My wife can sing along to the music I am listening to, standing 15 feet away, when the volume is turned up to about 65% on my iPhone. We compared these to the kids $20 Sony over-the-ear headphones and you could barely hear any noise 3 feet away when turned up to about 75% on my iPhone, and you certainly could not sing along with the music. If you want to turn up the volume to 80% and broadcast to everyone around you what you are listening to, then these will make a great set of headphones for you. I would not want to sit next to a person on a plane wearing these, and will thus not be using them for what I had intended hoping to spare someone else that which I would not want to hear while sitting on a plane for hours on end. Additional info in response to customer service email nagging: Hi Sarah- Thank you for your comments on the headphones and about what these headphones are not. Reality and experience with these headphones are that they look nice but lack in insulation or noise noise reduction both ways. To not hear people around me (and there are always people talking on planes, trains, and other places with low frequency noises), because the noise cancelling does not cancel voices out nor does the noise insulation of the soft earphone padding minimize any of the sound of others talking around you, you have to turn up the volume. Not anywhere near a level that might damage my hearing; and when you do so, everyone knows what you are listening to - in detail. In experimenting with them by putting them on my leg to mimic the headphones being on someone, we were actually able to hear the sound from the headphones better than when we just held them in the air - volume at the same level, similar distance away. Simple physics principle that the headphones themselves act as a speaker resonating material when the sound bounces off your head/leg and back to the headphones plastic material. Bottom line, these are cheap, Chinese reverse engineered headphones that look nice but lack in everything else. They should sell for $20, but even then they still aren't as good in reducing/blocking sounds or have the sound quality of my kids on-the-ear $20 Sony headphones.

Absolutely I'd rate this headphone 3 stars, but people like me are attracted by the price and considering what you pay for, this head phone could be rated 6 stars. It is really value for the dollar ! Ok, now here is what you get: Build quality: is OK and even though you can tell that cost had to be saved on material it doesn't feel and look cheap. Chapeau to the Engineers who developed it. I also owned Bose head phones before and quality degraded over the years to such a degree that I refuse to buy their current products anymore. They used to be really great products. Sound: You'll find a lot of reviews that mention about different sound characteristic w and w/o activated noise cancelling. There is a simple technical reason for it. When you turn off power, it is your device that has to "drive" the speakers. Being said, the quality of the amplifier in your device defines the sound quality. As with most speakers a head phone speaker draws electrical current from the amplifier (amp) depending on the frequency. It seems that the speakers used in this device are quite demanding. If you connect them to a high quality head phone amp, that delivers any current at any frequency, the sound is clear and frequency response quite linear and realistic. Connecting to an Iphone (Apple products do have lousy head phone amps) degrades the sound severely. The amp doesn't provide electrical current for all frequencies equally. Not only is the frequency response compromised, but there is not enough peak power to exploit the full dynamic range of the speaker. The result is a boring sound that lacks any intensity. I compared to a Samsung Galaxy note and the difference is remarkable. So lets summarize "power off" like this: Depending on the quality of your device amp, the sound quality can be really bad, but also quite good. When you turn power on, the in-built amp takes action in two ways. First it decouples the device amp and does not required the device amp to deliver electrical current to the speakers directly anymore. That is a "relief" for any device amp and for a lousy one even more. So if the in-built head phone amp would just decouple, already the frequency response improved and music sounded more dynamic. But the in-built amp does more than this. Thanks to digital technology there are ways to make music sound more dynamic, wider, deeper, more airy and I could list many more attributes. This is called DSP (digital sound processing) and the Engineers did a good job. Turning on power is a much better listening experience. IMO the sound isn't trimmed to be most realistic but it pleases in a positive way as you can listen for hours without feeling an overdose of artificial sounding. And finally the DSP takes into calculation the feedback from an microphone that senses external noise level. It is difficult to explain the technical details of that technology. As it is digital technology it mostly comes down to algorithms and computing power. And as much I became to dislike Bose products for other reasons, I need to say that they are for sure technology leader in active noise cancelling. But here is the good news ! The H501 is close to it. If you objectively measured key parameters of noise cancelling technology , the H501 would be defeated in every aspect, but practically, in daily use, the differences are marginal. Let's move on to the "not so good": Unfortunate for me personally, the Engineering team consisted of Chinese only. They had no idea how big an ear of a German guy like me can be. I literally need to fold them into the head phone capsules. Sad to say, but this is the main and only reason I will return it. If you prefer to listen louder, you're going to annoy your close to neighbors. The head phone radiates quite a bit of sound and to make it worse, the design and materials used make the radiated sound like a tin can. Finally, one thing about active noise cancelling I really don't understand and which is in common for most noise cancelling head phones I know. They're designed to let through mid range frequencies like voices. Nice feature that is meant to be able to listen to announcements and crew members during flights. I could happily live without that in-built feature as in average I'd only miss 2 announcements per flight and 3 questions (a drink ?, what to eat ? could you move your leg out off the aisle ?). On the other hand I'd spare myself crying babies (no offense, as I otherwise love babies) and many other annoying noises that all are perfectly centered around mid range frequency, hence all transmitted and even amplified. These are my 50 cents and I hope these might assist you in making a qualified decision.

FYI: This review is for the H501 Active Noise Cancelling headphones. I work in a cubicle in an engineering center, with people frequently coming to the cubes around mine to semi-quietly discuss designs/etc. While I work, I like to play action-y movie soundtracks like Star Wars, Ironman, Jack Johnson (...for particularly stressful days...), etc. to keep me going. With these headphones turned on, I don't have to have my music turned up loud at all in order to not hear pretty much anything around me; however, without music these headphones have a somewhat difficult time filtering out sounds in the range of human voices, although they still do a great job of cancelling out a lot of background noise (air handler, button clicks, etc.). But, like I said, add a little music and I don't hear a thing. In fact, when someone comes to ask me a question, they've resorted to waving a hand next to my monitors because I can't hear them otherwise (and tapping my shoulder makes me jump ... ). I've checked to see if any of my music can be heard by someone near me. I don't turn my music up very loud, but I can't hear any music when I take the headphones off my head and set them down on my desk. All in all, these headphones are comfortable (I've been wearing them for about 3-4 hours each day, mostly in contiguous stints), and they work really well for my application. I've even tried wearing them while mowing the lawn, and they worked fairly well there, too. Also, going on ~three weeks of use and I haven't had to change the battery yet. Great purchase. Definitely worth it.

Here are the basic pros and cons before I go on to give some detail: Pros: - Quite comfortable, even for long flights - Very good noise cancelling - better than any previous noise cancelling headphone I've owned - Well designed case Cons: - Sound quality is acceptable, but barely so - Not obvious how to put in the battery I got these for air travel, and they're pretty good for that. Their comfort level is better than my previous Audio Technica model (now discontinued), and that counts for a lot. I wore them for four and a half hours on a recent flight, and experienced no discomfort at all. I couldn't wear the Audio Technicas that long without a break. I was impressed with the noise cancelling. When it's switched on, not only are the airplane engines gone, but even the speaker in the plane sounds off in the distance and barely intelligible. The case is well done, and smaller than the case for the Audio Technicas even though the headphones are about the same size. The audio isn't great, though. It's OK for casual listening during a flight, but barely so. I might use these while mowing the lawn, but with this sound, I don't expect to use them around the house. These headphones also exhibit one distressing modern tendency. Their outer design is very sleek. But to make it sleek, there are no indicators, labels, or other signals for how to open the battery compartment. I took them on a plane brand new without installing the battery, and never did figure out how to do it during the flight. I had to look it up in the manual after landing. You twist the right outer cover in a non-obvious way to get access to the battery compartment. My bottom line is that these are a cost-effective way to get good noise cancelling for travel. Their comfort and noise cancelling are on a par with much more expensive headphone, such as Bose QuietComfort. But their audio quality does not match those headphones. **Update 12 Sept 2016** The audio cable broke today. This was after a few weeks of light use. One channel stopped working. I used another cable without a mic that I had lying around, and the channel was fine. So I have to spend ten bucks to get a new audio cable with mic. Disappointing. **Update 10 July 2018** I now know the lifespan of these headphones, because the earpads are now torn and degrading. This is after about two years of use about once a week on average. They still work though - just can't find a pair of replacement earpads. One star reduced.

Excellent frequency response. Love the case and accessories that came with the head phones. These are as good as any I have used when I used to work in Radio. Liked them so much bought the grand daughter are pair for her birthday present. I work at a waste treatment plant here in Philadelphia. Every morning I do a mile walk around the plant while listening to my podcast. My last pair of noise cancelling head phones were by JVC. They were OK until I got near I-95 and the Walt Whitman Bridge or around loud machinery. They would relieve some noise but not enough. I did not want to spend hundreds on Bose head phone so I gave the H501 a shot. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality and fit first off so I put them on during my morning walk to give them a workout. These headphones eliminated all out side noise. Usually the loudest noise was under the bridge from all the cars and trucks. These head phones eliminated all the noise including traffic noise when I walk down the road next to I-95 in South Philly. Just to see how good they were I went into our Influent Pumping Station where we have six pumps that stand about five stories high and pump 70 million gallons per minute. These things make noise!. We usually have about 3 to 4 pumps running at any one time. While these headphones did not kill all the noise I would say they killed about 90%. In a couple of weeks I will be riding on a Southwest 737-800 to see how good they are and will report back my findings. Right now I give these a good 5 stars. I would highly recommend them.

I bought these on Amazonia Prime day. I had my first occasion to use them on a trip across country and they worked great. It completely blocked out the ambient noise on the airplane and were comfortable to wear. In total I have worn them for 30 hours of flying in the last 2 weeks. Unfortunately, I brought them home and tried to show my wife and the ear piece rotation point broke. Now the earpieces are functionally worthless and I can't wear them anymore. The sound is great and comfortable but the construction is surprisingly shoddy. Ithe headphones did not even make it through a whole battery.