Is it helpful, hype, or just totally misunderstood?
SUMMARY
- Most people don’t need Active Noise Cancellation (ANC). How it works: ANC generates an opposite soundwave to digitally cancel specific frequencies (like hums/rumbles).
- Passive Noise Cancellation (PNC) relies only on physical materials (the snug seal of earcups or ear tips) to naturally block sound from entering the ear.
- ANC uses microphones and processing to cancel specific low-frequency sounds. This process drains battery life, can introduce audio latency/artifacts, and is less effective against sudden, high-frequency noises like voices or barking compared to a good passive seal.
- A good passive seal (PNC) is recommended first because it offers broader noise blocking, keeps audio clean and natural, and requires no power.
If you’ve ever used headphones to try and block all the world’s noise around you, noise cancellation might be the best thing humanity’s invented since sliced bread. Finally! Your wishes have been granted, and life will become 2% more bearable; from your daily commutes to just walking around in general.
And if you’ve been in the market recently for some new headphones, you might have noticed that damn near everything out there comes with some kind of noise cancelling feature. But do you actually need them—especially when it comes to gaming? And even more so, when you’re gaming in shared spaces or noisy environments?
Or is “noise cancelling” simply another buzzword slapped onto headsets to artificially inflate its price?
First, some definitions:
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- Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) uses built-in microphones and audio processing to cancel out external sounds. It inverts the sound frequencies and layers them on top of each other to cancel them out.
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- Passive Noise Cancelling (PNC) relies fully on the physical seal. Snug ear cups for headphones and headsets, or well-fitting eartips for earphones and earbuds block sound out naturally.
So… Do gamers really need ANC?
Let’s break it down.
What is Noise-Canceling, and What it Actually Does
Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) actively listens to the “outside world” and plays back an “opposite” or inverted signal to cancel noises in certain frequencies like fans, AC hums, or engine rumbles. ANC can only cover a limited range of frequencies, and usually it has to be pre-programmed to cover only “the average noises” or what someone, somewhere, has defined as “the average sound frequencies that people consider as noise”.
Yes, more recent versions of ANC can use AI assistance to distinguish and identify background noises more accurately. But this comes at the cost of using more power or energy—which is gonna have to come from somewhere: either your wireless headset/earbuds or from your device that it’s plugged into (phone, tablet, Switch, Steam Deck, etc).
No matter how small you can call it, this ultimately means less gaming time overall that you can do on your device of choice. This isn’t bad when you’re just at home and plugs are everywhere (and electricity is “free”), but it’s a bigger problem when you’re out in the outside world.
And the even bigger problem is that no matter how many times you slice it, ANC will affect the sound quality of your games, music, or movies for the worse. Because you are, quite literally, layering the negative version of the “outside noise” on top of your game, music, or movie in order to cancel out that specific sound, there are gonna be sound quality loss and distortion issues you will end up experiencing.
In addition, ANC can only cancel that specific pre-determined frequency range well (let’s say it’s between 50 Hz and 1 kHz, which is typical in most devices). However, everything outside of that range (i.e., under 50Hz and above 1kHz) can have very little, if any, noise cancelling. So if a Ducati, with its engine noise rated at about 1.6 to 4 kHz, pulls up right next to you on the sidewalk, there’s no way your ANC airpods are cancelling that kind of noise out.
But if you were inside your car with all windows up and your doors are properly closed, that would do a much better job in keeping that unwanted noise out of your life. This brings us to…
Passive Noise Cancelling (PNC), on the other hand, doesn’t use tech—or not the flashy kind of tech, at least. It’s just a physical seal from a noise-blocking material in your headset or ear tips that blocks sound out. You wouldn’t need to electronically cancel out sound that doesn’t get in, in the first place. The tech here is mostly in the material sciences that helps increase sealing and comfort, and add better hygienic features.
We covered our full breakdown of ANC vs. PNC in this blog post, if you want to go deeper.
One myth to clear up: ANC is NOT magic.
It won’t cancel shouting, dogs barking, your mechanical keyboard, and especially the voices inside your head.
source: u/Delicious_Maize9656, via r/physicsmemes
We’ll go even further and claim that the reason why ANC is so popular is because of Apple, who popularized ANC because the original AirPods were designed with no proper seal at all. So ANC had to do the heavy lifting for that kind of design; a design that most earbuds and headsets don’t share.
/END RANT.
Let’s proceed.
Why It Doesn’t Always Help in Gaming
Let’s talk about where ANC might help, and where it probably won’t.
WON’T HELP
Competitive Gaming: Speed and precision matters. ANC can introduce latency or sound artifacts, which is a no-go in high-stakes FPS or fighting games, or when your setup needs the least latency possible in case you encounter minor network issues.
PNC is much better here. It’s cleaner, faster, and less distracting.
LIKELY WON’T HELP
Immersive/Single-Player Gamers: ANC might help if you live right next to a construction site, and even then that probably won’t do much if it’s an active construction with on-and-off activity. But if your room’s generally quiet?
No real benefit to ANC, and PNC is more than enough to keep you very immersed in single-player games.
MIGHT HELP
Mobile/Casual Gamers: If you’re gaming in cafes, airports, or during your daily commutes, ANC can help you hear your games better. But because of the extra processing power needed, it’s gonna cost you some battery life.
In many cases, a good passive seal still does most of the work.
NOT THAT KIND OF ANC:
Streamers / Voice Chat: Here’s a big one: ANC DOES NOT AFFECT YOUR MIC. There are noise cancelling features tied to your mic, but these are usually for chat and video calling apps like Zoom or Discord.
Don’t get us wrong, in the context of mics you speak into, not earbuds you listen out of, these can help. But the people on the other side of your stream or call will still hear your background noise. That is, unless you use a separate mic noise suppression tool like NVIDIA Broadcast or Krisp.
Why Passive Cancellation Might Be All You Really Need
Let’s be honest: most gamers don’t need ANC. What they actually need is some good, solid passive noise cancellation.
A good passive seal…
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- Blocks out a wider range of sounds than the best ANC could, since you can only preprogram ANC to block certain frequency ranges.
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- Doesn’t require battery, extra power, or digital processing. So it’s ultimately more listening time for you, especially when you’re going wireless.
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- Keeps sound clean and natural because it doesn’t mess with the soundwaves, giving you the clearest and best possible unmodified sound experience as possible
High-quality in-ear earbuds with well-fitting ear tips or over-ear headsets with tight memory foam pads, are often more effective than ANC at keeping unwanted sound and distractions out.
Especially for higher-frequency noises (voices, sudden sounds), and for being able to cover or block a full spectrum of sound, PNC wins.
When Should You Actually Get ANC?
We’re not saying ANC is completely useless, even when PNC is superior in most areas. Even we can admit that it is a useful piece of technology.
But when does having ANC make sense?
In most cases, it really doesn’t.
If your choice of earbuds are designed like AirPods, and do not have silicone or rubber eartips to properly seal-off the outside world, then yes. You WILL need some ANC. But there’s a reason why the world moved on to better earphone designs, such as the one we have today, that has the silicone or rubber eartip: it’s simply better.
With that design, you can already get a much better sound quality with the passive noise cancellation, without adding the extra baggage, processing power, and energy requirements that ANC adds to the picture.
You can think of ANC as another defensive layer, or add-on: it’s a thing that’s nice to have on top of the good foundation that PNC can offer, but it shouldn’t be the thing that’s supposed to be the thing primarily responsible for reducing the unwanted outside noise.
If passive cancellation isn’t enough, then sure, add ANC on top. But never depend on ANC, and ANC alone to “block out” unwanted sounds, and expect it to work like magic.
Conclusion
Now, do you need active noise cancelling for gaming?
No.
Passive noise cancellation does a much better job of “cancelling noise” by blocking out the unwanted noise to begin with. It covers a wider range of the sound spectrum, versus a limited and pre-programmed range of frequencies as with ANC.
As a result you’ll get better sound blocking across a broader and deeper range of sound frequencies, a lot less compromise on the audio quality, and no added battery drains or latency effects with PNC versus ANC.
TL;DR…
Get a headset with great passive noise cancellation first.
ANC is optional—and only worth it if your environment ABSOLUTELY demands it. Otherwise it’s just extra dead weight.
