Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of active noise cancellation.

I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show we're talking about headphones.

Specifically, we're talking about headphone microphones, which I have long believed are just a severely underrated bit of technology.

We do a lot of headphone testing here at the Verge. We all wear

headphones all day. We all care a lot about sound quality. And if you read a lot of headphone

reviews, you can get super deep into noise cancellation features, and you can get super deep into

the interface. You can get super deep into sound quality. And then there's always just one line

that's like, ah, microphone does

calls. I want to know more. And so every once in a while on this show, we get somebody to bring

us a bunch of different devices and we test their microphones. I care about this just as a person,

but also because I think this technology matters, right? Like we all make calls increasingly on these devices,

increasingly out in the world,

and knowing how you sound to other people is important,

both because you wanna be a good person

who doesn't make everyone's lives miserable,

and also because there is lots of evidence,

scientific evidence, that shows if you sound good,

people take you more seriously. It's just a real thing. At the same time,

if you think about the way that we are all learning how to interact with AI systems, a lot of that is by voice,

a lot of that is through headphones. The difference between a good microphone and a bad microphone

is the difference between having a good AI experience and a bad AI experience.

This thing matters. It also just makes for really fun and often terrible podcast audio.

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