![]() In most airplanes, particularly the piston-powered ones most of us fly, the greatest amount of noise is created right in the range that ANR technology is best at deleting it. The great thing about the technology for aviation is that it works best with the big fat sound waves at the low end of the graph. The electronics flip the sound waves around and send them to a speaker inside the muff that plays them exactly out of synch with the noise around you. ANR headsets work by gathering the ambient noise with microphones in the earpieces and sending it to a processor. But we can’t go any farther with the rest of you without a brief primer on the technology and the special place it has in aviation. That may sound a little ostentatious for the cockpit (an MP3 is decidedly out of place in my C-140), but they’re nice features that I bet will get used a lot more than most pilots will be willing to admit! There is one feature that will be silently thanked thousands of times: The headset senses when it is not being worn and turns itself off, thus preserving the two AA alkalines (which normally last about 35 hours).For those of you who are slaves to the technical details, LightSPEED’s online spec sheet should provide all the numbers and graphs you can absorb. In addition to 30 db of noise cancellation, the highest available, it allows auxiliary sound sources, like CD or MP3 players and cellphones, to be plugged right in. My vow never to fly without a headset has now been modified to specify never flying willingly without an ANR headset.In a nutshell, the 3G does what it says it’s going to do, and it offers a few extra features that help justify its luxury price tag. But if you’ve never tried an ANR headset before, nothing prepares you for the tranquility that they provide in the clatter of most cockpits. Stretching back your memory to 11th-grade Physics, you understand how this can work. If you’re like me, you’ve heard about ANR technology and know basically that it works by creating sound waves that cancel out the incoming noise. I’ve also learned a lot about cockpit noise, its effects - both long- and short-term - and why it’s all-important. In general, this is a marvelous piece of equipment (it’s not perfect, though), and I’m saving my pennies while getting by with something vastly inferior in the meantime. At the time, I wasn’t sure that any headset could be worth the $599 they were asking, but I have to say I’ve revised that position. There are also passive models, ranging from $139 to $199. LightSPEED ANR headsets start at $299 for 10-12 db of cancellation. I put off any purchasing decisions until I’d had a chance to test this top-of-the-line model with its leading-edge technology. About that time, I was given the opportunity to review LightSPEED’s latest model, the Thirty 3G Active Noise Reduction (ANR) for AVweb. ![]() Best of all, you could hear every word that other pilots were saying, clearly and without misunderstanding.Although I knew that prices and designs for headsets varied considerably, it never occurred to me that performance and comfort could also be so varied, until I started looking for a new headset for my plane. As we climbed out, I lifted the thin foam cups away from my ears and was astounded by the cacophony that existed beyond them. “You’ll never fly without one if you’re with me,” he replied briskly. “I’ve never flown with a headset,” I protested. The next checkride I had was with an ex-military pilot who handed me a headset as we were signing out the plane. Of course, I got used to picking out the sounds on the tinny Cessna speaker, and anticipating the responses to my calls helped to fill in whatever gaps a sudden wind gust or other noise might mask. Pamela, you see, didnt wear a headset, and with almost 10,000 hours of single-engine time, she clearly believed it was the right way to fly.I ended up coming to the conclusion that she’d decided I should be able to fly without a headset in case I had to one day, but I don’t know if that was her real motive. Then, yelling above the din of prop and Lycoming up front, she somehow made it understood that we were taking off. My instructor, Pamela, was handling the radio work and I couldn’t understand a thing that was being said. ![]() I was 33 by the time I slid into the left seat of the 152 for my first lesson, and by the time we’d finished the run-up and were pointed down the runway, I’d had my first gnawing doubt about being able to do this.
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