SEPTEMBER 2020 MACWORLD 105The Redemption ANC with the charging case open.
invd). Fortunately, it’s easy to learn the
controls, but they’re not so intuitive that
you’ll easily figure out their full range on
your own without some frustration.
That said, you’ll probably end up
frustrated anyway because of the finicky
controls. At least a third of the time the
Redemption buds interpreted my three
taps for turning off the ANC as two taps, so
I’d end up having an unexpected chat with
Siri. I had similar troubles with the right bud
when I was trying to skip forward to the
next track. Even after several days with the
Redemption buds, this never stopped
being a problem.
NOISE CANCELLATION AND
SOUND QUALITY
And then there’s the actual noise
canceling. It works, technically, but
sometimes I wouldn’t have even known it
was on were it not for the built-in British-
accented voice confirmation. Frankly, the
ANC I experienced with these
headphones was about the same level of
noise canceling I might get from wrapping
a T-shirt around my ears. Sounds that I’d
normally expect to be muted by ANC—my
desk fan, the cars going by on my street,
and even the wind on my windows—still
managed to sneak through regardless of