A review of active noise cancellation (ANC) headphones outlines their benefits, including blocking steady background noise, improving audio clarity, protecting hearing by reducing the need for high volume, and aiding focus or sleep. It also highlights drawbacks: ANC struggles with sudden loud sounds, can sometimes degrade audio quality or cause ear discomfort, may reduce situational awareness in unsafe settings, and drains battery life faster than headphones without the feature.
Nothing's debut over-ear headphones, the Headphone 1, are now selling for $224.99 on Amazon, down from their $299 list price. The headphones use custom 40mm drivers co-tuned with KEF, support LDAC and wired USB-C/3.5mm audio, and offer adaptive ANC, spatial audio with head tracking, and multipoint Bluetooth. Battery life reaches up to 35 hours with noise cancellation on and 80 hours with it off.
Apple's new AirPods 5 bring a noticeable jump in sound quality, with improved bass and more detailed instrumentation compared to the AirPods 4, according to a hands-on review. The earbuds also gain active noise cancellation that handles steady background noise like HVAC hum well, though human voices remain harder to block out fully.
The US International Trade Commission has launched a Section 337 investigation into Apple, Samsung, and Google following a complaint from BoomCloud 360, a California audio tech firm. BoomCloud 360 alleges the three companies' spatial audio features infringe three of its patents covering gain adjustment, speaker asymmetry compensation, and crosstalk correction.
An independent developer has released an updated version of a browser-based video conferencing tool that places participants in a navigable 3D space rather than a fixed grid layout. Users can move their avatars around a virtual room and naturally form small groups, with spatial audio adjusting volume based on proximity to other attendees.
Lunacy Audio has released Nova, a platform where developers can create and sell music software instruments assembled from premade effects blocks and AI prompts rather than traditional code. The launch includes 10 initial plug-ins, ranging from lo-fi cassette-style synths to ambient drone generators, built by Lunacy and select partners. A companion host plugin lets users load and switch between Nova instruments inside their digital audio workstation, and instruments can also run in a browser without one.
Microsoft released an out-of-band update this week for Windows 11 versions 26H2, 25H2, and 24H2 to fix an audio bug that broke sound on older USB devices using the legacy Audio Class 1.0 driver. The flaw, introduced by the September 8 security update, left affected headsets and speakers silent, with unresponsive volume controls or a Device Manager error. The new patch also resolves several other recent issues alongside a couple of security flaws.
A developer reprogrammed the firmware of IK Multimedia's iRig HD X USB audio interface to run NAM A2-Lite, a compact neural amp-modeling engine, directly on the device's built-in 500 MHz NXP Cortex-M7 processor. Instead of streaming guitar audio to a computer or phone for amp simulation, the interface now processes a 5150-with-OD808 amp model in real time internally, fitting the engine into 128 KiB of FlexRAM and measuring performance close to the original NAMCore software.
Google has broadened NotebookLM's real-time voice conversation feature to support close to 100 languages, letting users talk with their notebooks beyond English. The update also adds audio recording capabilities and interactive Learning Overviews to help users engage with their materials in more ways.
Spotify's new Lossless tier delivers CD-quality, uncompressed audio, but Bluetooth connections can't transmit a true lossless signal, meaning wireless earbuds and speakers won't benefit. Listeners need wired headphones, USB-C earbuds, wired computer speakers, or Wi-Fi-based Spotify Connect devices to actually hear the improved quality, and even then, cheap audio hardware may not reveal a noticeable difference.
A new comparison examines the practical differences between passive wired speaker setups and wireless Bluetooth systems, focusing on modularity, latency and cable management. It notes that wired systems let users swap components like amplifiers or speakers independently, while removing Bluetooth transmission delay from the audio chain. The piece also cautions that cables alone don't guarantee better sound quality if the source audio is already compressed.
Google has rolled out its latest Pixel feature drop, giving Pixel 6 and newer users home screen widgets for quick calls or texts to VIP contacts, plus new scam detection warnings built into the Gboard keyboard for chat apps. The update also brings Harry Potter-themed customization packs and two free months of Audible, tied to the release of a new full-cast audiobook series, alongside gesture improvements for the Pixel Watch line.
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