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I purchase the Sony MDR-1RNC MK2 back in November 2013. I bought this headphone from Sony Centre on 440 Murray St in Perth City. RRP for this unit is $499 (not cheap!) but I purchased this when the store had 20% off all headphones so I was fortunate enough to get almost $100 off my new gadget.

2 key points that made my decision was:

Noise cancelling headphone requires batteries to work. Some make/model uses AAA batteries, others are recharge-able via mini USB. This MDR-1RNC MK2 charges up using a generic mini USB cable (same cable to charge up Windows/Android phones) and when it runs out of battery the headphone still works. You can still listen to your favourite music except for the fact that the noise cancelling feature won’t work. FAIR GAME IMO. The BOSE headphone will be dead hardware when the batteries runs out. The QC15 claims to operate for 35 hours until you need to change them however there is no battery indicator therefore you either have to keep track of usage or bring spare AAA batteries.

If you want a review on how good the product is, I am sure there are better review of this product out there written by true audiophiles that understand the technicality of sound waves. My intention of this post is somewhat a bit different; before I get to that I would like to establish my facts:

The main reason for me to spend $400 on a headphone was to eliminate constant noise when I board my flights and whilst working in a datacentre. For all you none IT geeks reading this, a datacentre is a room full with racks of servers. When you have endless racks of server turned on with all their high speed fans spinning to keep the equipment cool it is almost the same noisy noise that an aircraft engine produce during flights.

Did my purchase meet my requirements? FAIL! EPIC FAIL!
Did my purchase helped? Yes it did but even purchase of an over-ear headphone without noise cancelling would have helped as well, probably cost 1/2 the price!
Would purchasing another make/model meet my requirements?NO.

Any quality noise cancelling headphones will come built with comfy leather plush cushions. When you wrap any of these headphones around your ear this has effectively cancel almost 1/2 the volume of the noise within your environment. Therefore when you wear a noise cancelling headphone in your office environment, you can hear that the headphone sends you to an audio black hole. A mate of mine even says that it is painfully silent!

How noise cancelling works is that there are microphone within the headphone to create anti-noise. However when the noise is the sound of a BOEING engine or fan noise in a datacentre, there is NOway to effectively cancel all of that. Therefore if you would like to buy one headphone for the same reason as mine, then beware that you will be disappointed.

My experience of what happens when I use my headphone during a flight? The constant loud hum from the Boeing engine is translated to a different lower level hum on the headphone, not sure if you follow me here. In essence, it did not cancel the noise of the engine, it just changes it to a lower volume constant noise. Same results when I have to do work in a datacentre. Constant noise from the fans is translated to another constant noise. The fact that these headphones are over ear, even without noise cancelling the volume of the annoying noise has been reduced dramatically.

2nd tip where no review would tell you! If you wear glasses 24/7 even in your sleep, like me. You won’t be able to wear any headphones over extended period of time. I would say max usage was 2hrs and I had to take it off. Ear phones still the best for me.