Noise-cancelling and an open-ear design? The AirPods 4 with ANC sound weird, but I think they might be great

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Of all of the AirPods I own, it's actually the AirPods 3 that I use the most. The AirPods Max are unsurprisingly my favourites from a sound quality point of view and what I use when at my desk, but they're just too big and cumbersome to be taken absolutely everywhere. The AirPods Pro, on the other hand, are really portable and offer high-quality sound and active noise cancellation, but I find that they work their way out of my ears a little too easily.

I also have this seemingly unusual desire to be vaguely aware of what's going on around me when I'm out and about, so I don't love using isolating headphones when walking or jogging across London. I am of course well aware that both the AirPods Max and the AirPods Pro have a 'Transparency' mode that pumps external noise through to your ears, but this doesn't always sound entirely natural to me.

All of which explains why I use the AirPods 3 so much. The open-ear design allows some external noise to get to me in a natural way, I find them super-comfortable and they're obviously super-portable, and while the sound quality clearly isn't up there with that of the AirPods Pro or Max, it's good enough, particularly as much of my listening is to podcasts.

However, from time to time I do still crave a little bit of noise-cancelling. On the noisy Bakerloo Line of the London Underground, for example, or when I'm cooking and need to block out my ridiculously noisy cooker hood (I really must get that changed). That's why I'm really rather excited about the new AirPods 4 with ANC which, along with a host of apparent sonic upgrades, feature (as the name suggests) active noise cancelling.

Now, I'm not sure how well the noise cancelling is going to work, seeing as the open-ear design remains, but it doesn't have to be perfect for me. The open-ear design really matters to me, and I don't mind dealing with average noise cancellation in order to keep that.

Of course, all of this depends on whether the AirPods 4 actually sound good, which we won't know until we get a pair in for a full review. Stay tuned for that.

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