Hot headphones for your holiday gift list

Krakow gives a thumbs-up to noise-canceling JVCs and Stax's electrostatics

JVC	JVC thought of everything withe their noise-cancelling headset - including a place to hide the cord when not in use.

By Gary Krakow

Columnist

MSNBC

updated 11:45 a.m. ET Dec. 6, 2006

Gary Krakow
Columnist
• E-mail

Listening to a portable music player anytime, especially on a long flight, is one of the best reasons to own one of those devices. Unfortunately, the earphones you get when you buy a player usually sound horrible. They’re sometimes called throw-aways — because that’s what you should do with them.

Luckily, you can buy a set that sounds one billion percent better than those throw-aways.

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These days you have many choices in almost every price range. Usually you get what you pay for (my favorites are Shure’s E500PTH, which currently retail for $499). But recently I found two units which score very high on my “bang-for-the-buck” scale. They sound great and make terrific holiday gifts.

I never know who I’m going to meet when I get on an airplane. A while back I sat next to a gentleman who was listening to music on a set of noise-canceling headphones. Being naturally inquisitive I asked what they were. He told me they were JVC’s and asked if I wanted to listen. I did – and now I’m telling you about them.

It turns out that the gentleman next to me was the boss at JVC’s headphone division. It also turns out that he was right — the NC-100s sound very good. Then he really floored me by mentioning the price.

The NC-100’s are over-the-ear stereo headphones with an active noise-canceling circuitry. That means the headphones electronically create low-level sounds that mask ambient noise from interfering with the music. Ambient noise can be anything from the drone of airplane engines to road noise in a car to ventilation hum. Electronic-noise canceling is a simple technique that works quite well.

The headphones themselves are cleverly designed. The cord can be reeled in to the left earphone enclosure and the active circuitry’s single AAA battery hides in the right earphone. The headphones fold and collapse to fit into a nifty faux-leather pouch. And the NC-100s are super-lightweight: All told the headset (cord and battery) weighs only 7 ounces.