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Is Active Noise Cancelling good or bad for your hearing?

I’ve been passively assuming that ANC is bad for you, that it causes tinnitus or something, but it looks like it’s more of a mixed bag. I finally got around to looking this up last week when I was trying to decide which headphones to bring on a flight.

The general answer seems to be that, on a flight or other scenario with a steady, loud background noise, ANC works to actually cancel out the noise through destructive sound waves. That means less pressure on your eardrums, making ANC good for your hearing. Unless of course you’re blasting your music or violating some other obvious caveat.

But that may not be the end of the story. The BBC reported in February 2025 that audiologists are concerned there may be a link between ANC overuse and “auditory processing disorder (APD), a neurological condition where the brain finds it difficult to understand sounds and spoken words.”

I guess I’ll play it safe for now, using my ANC headphones (Sony WH-1000XM5) on flights but otherwise avoiding them, which was basically already my pattern. Curious to see what more research tells us.

#headphones