High fidelity

Decent headphones are invaluable for travellers. Whether you’re on a train or plane, noise-cancelling is essential. While some airlines provide headphones in premium cabins, you almost certainly won’t have them if you’re further back, and even in business they are rarely anything special.

Note that noise-isolating, whereby the headphones merely form a seal between you and the outside world, is different from noise-cancelling. The latter is a clever electronic system that uses a microphone to measure ambient noise. This noise is then reversed in phase and fed back into the earpieces. The out-of-phase “anti-noise” cancels the real noise. Sounds weird, but it does the trick.

Two pairs here lack noise-cancelling technology: Apple’s AirPods and