Being a musician and engineer I've always tried to take care of my hearing which meant wearing earplugs when I ride (legal here but not the best thing). I've also tried to find a helmet that does a good job of reducing wind noise but the ratings are vague. So, I decided to splurge and buy a set of the new Bose QC20 noise cancelling in ear headsets. They are phenomenal! The noise reduction is unbelievable and they fit and work with my helmet on. The cool thing is they also have a "listen mode". You push a button on the switch pack and it opens up the processing allowing you to hear more noise; Sort of a "half noise cancelling" mode good for when you need to talk with somebody or you want to hear all of the great overtones from your slip-ons. There may be cheaper headphones on the market but at this point, I don't care. The loss of noise in my helmet means longer rides and less fatigue.

Τhere are quiet helmets in market , but the point is to listen the sense of motor-music especial from Paso breath at low rpm ....!

The button is inline where the left and right earbud cables meet. There's also a clip. I clip it to the neck cuff on my jacket.The only thing I don't like about them is that the cables are rather thick so you can't wrap them up and over your ears and out the back of your helmet. The trade off is that they are durable.

The purpose of noise camcelling is not to avoid hearing loss. It's to avoid fatigue. Constant "background" noise creates fatigue over time and the "drone" tends to make your senses less sharp. Besides, I never get tired of hearing what my bike sounds like.

What's 'noise' in this context? - Wind noise

Are you saying these headphones cancel out everything but the bike? - Pretty much. I'm impressed by the headphones ability to differentiate between constant noise (in this case wind) and sounds that are not sustained (e.g. human voice, car horn, etc.). They do an overall attenuation of sound in general but no worse than if I have a set of foamies in my ears. I can hear the bike at a lower volume level and there is some masking of the "drone" of the engine but because the wind noise is masked it makes it easier to hear the mechanicals of the bike. For example; I was hearing a random "click". It sounded like something was hitting the fairing. Upon inspection I discovered the connector for the front parking light (European model) had come lose and was dangling in the fairing occasionally hitting it.

BTW - what's it doing for low frequency rumble you normally get from electric motors, etc.?

The only "LF rumble" I've ever used it around is small jet plane commuter flights. Works really well. I don't think it's learning curves. That's really advanced DSP. Although, it might do adaptive learning but doesn't store anything. My guess is that Bose probably starts with the algorhythm from automotive systems and tweaks it.

BTW - I'm an audio and systems engineer so I get really picky with this stuff. I won't put anything in my ears (or close to them) I don't trust or like.

Bose has their own proprietary alogarithm. My wifes Uncle was one of the founders of Bose


Bose always works better than the rest so far