Honestly, I used to think that ANC was totally unnecessary for in-ear headphones. I mean, they’re already like earplugs with passive isolation, right? Plus, the two ANC headphones I’d owned in the past added background hiss whenever noise cancelling was activated, had bloated bass bleed, and I wondered if the cancelled frequencies would dig “holes” in the playback frequency response.
And with the Sennheiser MTW2, not only did I not care about the added ANC, I didn’t care about the extended battery life because I think of TWS headphones as “daily items” that you always take and frequently recharge anyway, like a phone. Sennheiser gave me an MTW (first gen), and I liked it better than the V2 because it had the same sound quality EXCEPT the first Gen had no background hiss (gen 2 has a bit of “snow” as a trade-off for the more power efficient Qualcomm chip, but otherwise they use the same transducer and same tuning/acoustic capsule) and as a gamer I felt I wanted the aptX Low Latency codec that was only in the gen 1 MTW. So, the original MTW was the best SQ true wireless I’d heard and only one I bothered owning for awhile. I have not heard the current MTW3.
And honestly, the grell TWS/1 is a leap ahead of the MTW. It also has no snow, even with ANC on, but it sounds so much more organic… the MTW has some digital glare and robotic sound that I didn’t notice till I compared with the grell side-by-side, whereas the grell sounds like a nice wired headphone. The fact that you get 1+4 charges and the case will hold a charge for a month is a bonus, but realizing I could just drop the case on my wireless charger while I use the headphones on a walk was a game-changer for me (somehow, I didn’t connect this dot while I used the MTW).
Turns out, the ANC does create a more cleaning listening environment, even if I am walking a park. On top of that, Axel explained that it actually IMPROVES the base SQ by reducing distortion, which I re-share here:
Some disclosures for everyone else here in the name of honesty and fairness: I used to do contract work for Sennheiser and I still respect them, but I left to rejoin Axel doing contract work with his grell audio small company. And the grell wasn’t all peaches and cream when it launched… as with all wireless products, there’s a chance for signal interference, but we were able to greatly improve connection stability with a firmware update this spring, so now a connection stutter is rare.
The first notes of a song are often my favorite and the most likely to give me ASMR goosebumps… they set the tone for the whole song! So I use rewind a lot. One button might not be such a problem for me when I’m using my iPhone as a source, because I also have their smartwatch which gives me full remote control, but it’s still an issue if I want to use Bluetooth with my PC while using a full-screen app or with my iPad/NVIDIA Shield/etc that really benefit from remote controls.
It’s hard to argue against touch controls when it comes to a wide array of remote control functions. As long as the touch is as responsive as a smartphone
. Controls on both earpieces also ensure that the most commonly used functions (pause, volume, rewind/ff, transparent mode) are just a single tap or swipe away. How do you even control volume on those headphones??
@Fleeple It would be very interesting to me to read what you didn’t like about the AirPods Pro
I need to order some more Comply, it’s been a few years.
