The best headphone mic we've ever tested

Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of active noise cancellation. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're talking about headphones. Specifically, we're talking about headphone microphones, which I have long believed are just a severely underrated bit of technology. We do a lot of headphone testing here at The Verge. We all wear headphones all day. We all care a lot about sound quality. And if you read a lot of headphone reviews, you can get super deep into noise cancellation features, and you can get super deep into the interface. You can get super deep into sound quality. And then there's always just one line that's like, microphone does calls. I wanna know more. And so every once in a while on this show, we get somebody to bring us a bunch of different devices, and we test their microphones. I care about this just as a person, but also because I think this technology matters. Right? Like, we all make calls increasingly on these devices, increasingly out in the world, and knowing how you sound to other people is important both because you wanna be a good person who doesn't make everyone's lives miserable, and also because there is lots of evidence, scientific evidence that shows if you sound good, people take you more seriously. It's just a real thing. At the same time, if you think about the way that we are all learning how to interact with AI systems, a lot of that is by voice, a lot of that is through headphones. The difference between a good microphone and a bad microphone is the difference between having a good AI experience and a bad AI experience. This thing matters. It also just makes for really fun and often terrible podcast audio. So John Higgins, The Verge's senior reviewer, is gonna come on. He's got a bunch of stuff. He is, I assume, somewhere very noisy, and we're gonna do some tests. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is ninety seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, 06/17/2026. Big smart home day. The new Matter 1.6 smart home spec launched today. And stop, if you've heard of this before, but it is supposedly going to make it easier to control your smart home. Specifically, Matter 1.6 includes this new feature called joint fabric, which makes it easier to set up a smart device like a light or a sensor or whatever and immediately have it be controlled by Alexa, Apple Home, Gemini, and all of your other stuff all at once. Supposedly, it all just works. There's also a new NFC setup feature that lets you tap a device to your phone to set it up rather than scanning a QR code. As with all things matter, these are good ideas, and I really hope they work. And as with all things matter, I am not remotely holding my breath. Meanwhile, the Google Home Speaker, …