Hardware Info: Mixcder E9 Wireless Active Noise Canceling Headphones Specifications:

Over the ear headphones

40mm driver

Frequency response: 20Hz-20,000Hz

Impedance: 32 Ohm

Sensitivity: 94dB

THD: <3% Microphone:

Omni-directional

Sensitivity: -42dB

Operation Voltage: 2V

Impedance: <= 2.2 kOhm Bluetooth:

Version 4.0

Distance: 33ft outdoors, 49ft indoors

Transmission Range (Hz): 2.402 GHz - 2.48 GHz

Support Profile: HSP/HFP/A2DP/AVRCP

Pairing Name: Mixcder E9 Battery: Built-in 500mAh rechargeable lithium battery

Charging Port: Micro USB 5V/1A

Running Time: About 30 hours talking or music with ANC Off; 24 hours with ANC On

Charging Time: About 2.5 hours

Operating Temperature: -10C - 45C Included in the package:

Compact carrying case

3.5mm cable, length: ~5ft

USB Micro charge cable (short; I left it wrapped up, as I have plenty)

Airplane adapter

Instruction manual and warranty card Connectors: USB (charging only), 3.5mm for stereo audio signal

Microphone built-in

High quality leather-like ear pads

Folding design

Power, volume up/down buttons

Active Noise Canceling On/Off Switch



Price: $59.99

(Amazon Affiliate Link)

Thank you Mixcder for sending us this Bluetooth headphone to review!

I have long been passionate about good sound. I was spoiled as a child, as my dad had a great sound system, though I didn’t realize how good it was until I moved out and no longer had access to it. Once I came to realize how bad cheap sound can be, and how good things can get, I have since been on a quest to be able to enjoy all content – music, games, movies, and more – with the best fidelity possible.

Once I got my home theater system sounding great, I then turned to personal audio. I have since found nice earbuds, and I also help my friends and family find headphones that make them happy. For listening at my desk, I prefer open-backed headphones, because they tend to have a more 'real' sound - there is a certain spaciousness that only real space can provide. Also, it's generally a benefit if I can hear someone calling for me when I'm playing a game at my computer. (This is less true while listening to music at the office.)

As great as open-back headphones can sound, they are simply not practical for all use cases. In the most extreme case, you are on public transportation, or even on an airplane. Not only do you not want to hear your neighbors, but your neighbors almost certainly don't want to hear you - open cans share both ways. At that point it's usually best to use sound-isolating, or noise-canceling headphones. The Mixcder E9s are of the latter type.

Active noise-canceling headphones work on a unique premise: in addition to getting a good seal on your head to block out external sounds, they also have a microphone on the outside that records ambient noise and plays back a phase-shifted version of that signal back towards your ears, which leads to silence.

If you'll forgive the physics lesson, all sound is varying levels of pressure. A single note or tone vibrates at a certain frequency, or vibrations per second, using a unit called Hertz (or Hz). As an aside, the reference note for most modern music is A4, or the 49th key on a standard full-size piano. This frequency is set at 440Hz; each A of an octave above or below is half or double of that value. The human ear can hear a total of approximately ten octaves. (Please excuse the musical digression.)

The relevant part here is that in order for a speaker (large or small; headphone or large speaker and anything in between) to reproduce a sound, it must vibrate at exactly the same rate as what the source material or recording has. This is true of all loudspeaker technologies; everything from dynamic drivers (common cone speakers) to domes to ribbons to piezos to electrostatics and everything in between; they all operate through vibration. Sound waves are often represented as the mathematical sine wave, and if you add one sine wave to the same wave exactly 180 degrees out of phase - where up is down and down is up - they add together and you get zero.

It seems crazy that you could actually experience this in the real world; you might think that adding two signals together would always make it louder, not quieter, but it really does work. So, by recording the sounds outside of the headphones, and playing back the phase-shifted signal in real time, all of a sudden you hear silence. Of course, just like sound reproduction isn't perfect, neither is noise canceling. But it works better than it should.

The noise canceling on the E9 works pretty well, though I think there is room for improvement. While we don't have too many pairs of noise-canceling headphones, we do have another pair, and it's the Monoprice 10010. (They are less expensive, but not wireless/Bluetooth.) The Mixcder seems to cancel lower frequencies out better, while the Monoprice cancels out the midrange a bit better. I found the total perceived volume reduction to be a bit better on the Monoprice, but many find that lower frequency noise is more bothersome, so it really depends. Both do a very good job of significantly reducing the volume of external noise.