You turn them on, and noise instantly fades away. Your favorite songs soar to new heights, sounding so rich and clear you might feel like you’re hearing them for the very first time. It’s magical to the ear—but it’s not magic. It’s the precise arrangement of microphones inside and outside the earcups. It’s proprietary electronics that continuously measure, compare and react to outside noises. And it’s the electronics sending an equal and opposite signal to the earcups’ speakers to cancel those noises. All so you can enjoy the music you love—or the silence you need.

The electronic noise floor is another obsession for us. A headphones’ noise floor is that soft hiss you might hear when listening in quiet environments. Because that noise is measurable, we continuously tweaked the electronics in QC35 headphones until that soft hiss became virtually undetectable.