An investigation of passive and active noise reduction using commercial and standard TDH-49 headphones

Abstract

Passive and active noise cancellation headphones' performance is a very important issue when we want to use them in some applications. The ANC commercial headphone has passive and active noise cancellation features, making it suitable for health applications such as Pure Tone Hearing Screening. It can replace the sound-treated booth and standard headphones then reduce the test cost and make the test run in remote area. Bose headphone has better active and passive noise attenuation compared to Sony headphone. Bose headphone has 3.2 dB noise attenuation better than Sony headphone at 500 Hz. Bose headphone also provides quite zone. Bose headphone is also cheaper than Sony headphone. In term of passive attenuation TDH-49 better than Bose and Sony headphones. Therefore, Bose headphone is more suitable for health applications to protect the workers from ambient noise. If it can be calibrated to an accurate hearing cut off level, it can be used for pure tone hearing screening test (PTHST) outside sound-treated booth As such, 500 Hz test tone can be included for hearing screening because it has a good performance to attenuate low-frequency noise.