


Unlike the Studio 3's closest competitor, the Bose QC35, Beats doesn't offer noise cancelling on the headphones' mic while making calls, which is a very attractive feature. It's definitely good enough if you just want a slightly better way to block out the world around you. Wearing the Beats Studio 3, I couldn't hear my fingers typing on my keyboard, for example. On the subway, I heard trains pull into the station, but my ears were saved from loud screeching. I could hear my coworkers on the phone or laughing, although it sounded like they were far away. At the Business Insider offices, where I did most of my testing, it didn't create complete silence. If you don't turn on music or other audio, you can use the noise-cancelling feature by itself. When you slip the Beats Studio 3 on your ears and turn them on, you can hear everything get quieter as the noise cancelling kicks in. Boston-based Bose is generally acknowledged as the leader in active noise cancelling headphones. In a nutshell, adaptive noise cancelling uses tiny microphones to listen to the world around the headset and then "subtract" that noise from what you're hearing. The Beats Studio 3 are the only pair of noise-cancelling headphones Apple makes. Apple calls their technology "adaptive noise cancelling," or ANC. The top feature on the Beats Studio 3 is noise cancellation.
