Gadgetory

when it comes to noise canceling headphones Bose is generally considered the gold standard but Sony's engineers have been on a mission to be posed at what it does best the result of their efforts is the MDR 1000x which Sony is calling its most technologically advanced headphone and features both wireless Bluetooth connectivity an adaptive noise cancellation in a swanky looking chassis that retails for $400 and ships in October sony says it developed new ear pads for this headphone and the embedded touch controls for volume adjustment and skipping tracks forward and back are more responsive than those found in the mdr-1a bt i'm not going to get into all the technical details but this headphone has similar drivers to the highly rated mdr-1a and as microphones not only on the outside to measure ambient noise but inside the headphone to take account for the shape of your head and ears and whether you wear glasses so he calls it the sense engine and says it tailors the noise canceling performance individually to you you can also choose alternate settings that allow more ambient noise to seep in or even filter out everything but voices so you can hear announcements in airports while listening to music another cool feature is the ability to muffle your music and let the outside rolled in by simply holding your hand over the right ear cup where the touch controls are located once you finish talking to someone you remove your hand and the music resumes playing at its previous volume and the noise canceling kicks back in battery life is rated at 20 hours and a cord is included if you want to listen in Wired mode if you're a frequent traveler the MDR 1000x should definitely be on your shortlist sound quality is top-notch for a bluetooth headphone and the noise cancelling appears to be as effective or even slightly more so than that of the bose qc25 but the bose is lighter and arguably slightly more comfortable it also costs $50 less both are impressive Wireless noise cancelling headphones that are easy to recommend for choosing between the two is going to be hard I'm David coronoid for cnet.com thanks for watching