The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 1978–1989
Bose cancelled engine roar by playing the noise's own inverse.
Rather than pad out a heavy headset, Bose sampled the ambient sound and played its exact inverse, so the two waves cancelled and pilots could hear speech.
Bose Corporation
the move
Amar Bose's company was born in consumer audio, but the idea behind its most famous product came in 1978 on a transatlantic flight when the airline's new electronic headphones made the engine roar worse. He began working out the mathematics of noise cancellation before the plane landed.
The approach is destructive interference: a microphone samples the ambient sound and a speaker plays the inverse phase of it, so the two waveforms meet and cancel. Passive earmuffs can only deaden noise by weight, so they struggle with the deep, constant drone of jet engines; an opposite wave has no such limit.
Bose built two prototypes for Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager on their record round-the-world Voyager flight, then launched its first commercial acoustic noise cancelling headset for pilots in 1989. The technology later moved to consumers in the QuietComfort line, where it changed what in-flight listening felt like.
why it works
- Active cancellation removes low-frequency noise that passive padding cannot stop.
- Playing the inverse wave needs only a microphone, a speaker and the right math.
- It preserves the sound the listener wants while killing the rumble.
- A decade of refinement produced a headset that defined the category for pilots.
what transfers
For low-frequency, roughly periodic noise the cheapest fix is not more insulation but a wave that is exactly out of phase.
what came after
Bose's noise cancelling headsets became the benchmark in aviation and changed consumer headphones, with the QuietComfort range making active cancellation a mainstream feature copied across the industry.
references
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