Aurelia Pro ANC Headphones

Active noise cancelling used to be a trade: silence, or sound quality, never both. The Aurelia Pro is the first pair under four hundred pounds where we stopped keeping score. Across six weeks, three flights, two rail strikes and one very loud open-plan office, they never became the thing we were thinking about.

How we tested

We ran the Aurelia Pro as a daily driver for 45 days: roughly 90 hours of listening across Apple Music, Qobuz and a stack of lossless test tracks, plus 14 hours of calls in Zoom and Meet. Noise cancelling was measured subjectively against a commuter baseline on two intercity trains and three short-haul flights, and objectively with an in-ear microphone rig recording cabin noise at the ear canal.

Noise cancelling

The headline number is a 27dB cut in low-frequency drone, which is within a whisker of the best we have measured and well ahead of anything near this price. More useful is the adaptive behaviour: on a train the set leans into rumble, in a cafe it prioritises the mid-range chatter band. It works, and it did not once produce the pressure thump that plagues cheaper implementations.

Sound

Neutral with a gentle bass shelf, which is exactly what you want for all-day listening. Treble is clean rather than sparkling, so badly mastered tracks stay listenable. The EQ in the app is a five-band affair that saves per-source, and the LDAC path genuinely improves busy passages when you have the bandwidth for it.

Where it falls down

The touch panel is the weak link. It is fine indoors and useless through a glove, so winter walks mean pulling hands out of pockets to skip a track. The case also commits the classic sin of being round in a world of rectangular bags.