The sound of nothing — how we built ANC for under €100
Active noise cancellation used to cost a premium. Here's the honest story of how we got it into STELLAR FlyPods without cutting the things that actually matter.
Why ANC has a price problem
Active noise cancellation isn't expensive because the technology is exotic. It's expensive because doing it well requires investment at every stage: driver selection, microphone placement, acoustic chamber tuning, and the processing that ties it all together.
Most budget earbuds offer ANC that barely clears 15 dB of reduction at mid frequencies and falls apart in the low end — exactly where commute noise, aircraft hum, and open-plan office drone actually live.
What good ANC actually does
A well-tuned ANC system creates an equal and opposite signal to incoming noise before it reaches your eardrum. The mics hear what's coming. The electronics invert it. The driver plays the cancellation tone alongside your music.
The hard part is timing. If the cancellation signal arrives even slightly out of phase, it doesn't cancel — it adds. Getting the latency of that loop tight enough to be effective across the full target frequency range is where most cheap implementations fail.
What we chose not to compromise on
We set a target early: 25 dB of reduction in the 100–800 Hz range — the commute-noise band. Everything in the hardware selection was oriented around hitting that number without battery penalty.
The dual-mic array placement went through six iterations. Outer mic position affects how well the system can sample incoming noise before it enters the canal. Inner mic position affects how well it can measure residual noise and self-correct. Getting both right in a housing this small was the hardest single problem in STELLAR FlyPods' physical design.
The battery tradeoff
ANC draws power. That's unavoidable. Our target was to keep the penalty under one hour at maximum ANC intensity — meaning you'd still get over 4 hours of active listening in the real world.
We hit it. Maximum ANC costs 0.8 hours compared to passive listening. In practice most people use ANC at medium — the penalty there is about 20 minutes.
The listening test that locked it in
We run a commute simulation in our test rig: 85 dB of recorded underground train noise on loop, measured at the eardrum with STELLAR FlyPods in. We ran 40 production units through it before we signed off on the spec.
"The target wasn't 'better than nothing.' It was 'better than 300-euro earbuds from three years ago.' We got there."
— Matteo, founder
What STELLARvibe adds
ANC on STELLAR FlyPods is voice-controllable through Vibe. 'ANC on,' 'transparency,' 'ANC off' — all offline commands, zero latency, work anywhere. The EQ also adjusts automatically when you switch modes, because the acoustic response of the earbud changes with ANC active.
That last detail — auto-adjusting EQ per ANC state — is something we haven't seen anyone else do at this price. It's not a headline feature. It's just the right thing to do.