Active noise cancellation is a fascinating feature of high-end headphones.
They require some rather complicated engineering.
Headphones such as these are able to eliminate or destroy unwanted noise that's produced by the external environment.
While simultaneously playing the desired music or audio that's sent from your smartphone.
In a nutshell, these types of headphones do this by using a microphone to measure the unwanted noise produced by the environment and then calculating an anti-sound wave.
This anti-sound wave is added to the waveform of your music or audio
And when the combined waveform is played through the headphone speaker, the external noise is eliminated or cancelled out, and just the desired audio remains.
That's the basic principle.
But there's a lot of intricate engineering that underpins active noise cancellation.
In order to better understand the engineering, it's easier to visualize sound waves not as these sinusoidal patterns, but rather as a set of traveling high-pressure zones, known as compressions, and low-pressure zones, known as rarefactions.
