What matters more for calls: ANC or a noise-reducing microphone?

Both technologies can work in tandem with each other. A noise reducing microphone is designed in a way to help reduce background noise by employing good design and engineering such as physical foam shielding to help block background frequencies, or making the microphone point towards the user's mouth, whilst shielding the rear.

ANC is a hardware and software technology that includes extra built in microphones usually within the headset’s ear cups - these microphones pick up ambient background noise, then using software built-in to the headset, equalize out that background sound from the sound picked up from the main microphone near the user's mouth so that sounds of keyboards tapping, traffic, colleagues chattering, washing machines etc, should all be completely mitigated with the Active Noise Cancellation tech built into your wireless headset.

The only minor downside with ANC is that if you're super specific on the quality of your voice, for example, a broadcaster or singer - when ANC is actively working it can flatten out some of your own speech in some situations, so this is worth bearing in mind for those edge cases, however ANC is a phenomenal technology for the rest of us!

Both technologies can work in tandem with each other. A noise reducing microphone is designed in a way to help reduce background noise by employing good design and engineering such as physical foam shielding to help block background frequencies, or making the microphone point towards the user’s mouth, whilst shielding the rear.

ANC is a hardware and software technology that includes extra built in microphones usually within the headset’s ear cups - these microphones pick up ambient background noise, then using software built-in to the headset, equalize out that background sound from the sound picked up from the main microphone near the user’s mouth so that sounds of keyboards tapping, traffic, colleagues chattering, washing machines etc, should all be completely mitigated with the Active Noise Cancellation tech built into your wireless headset.

The only minor downside with ANC is that if you’re super specific on the quality of your voice, for example, a broadcaster or singer - when ANC is actively working it can flatten out some of your own speech in some situations, so this is worth bearing in mind for those edge cases, however ANC is a phenomenal technology for the rest of us!