The Audio-Technica ATH-ANC300TW headphones were a little quirky when it came to powering them up. For most true wireless headphones, the accepted standard is that they'll power up and try to pair with a device as soon as you take them out of the box, or in some cases, as soon as the box lid is flipped open.
That's not the case with the ATH-ANC300TW headphones, which will power down when you put them back in the box, but must be switched on specifically when you take them out again. They also won't automatically pause when you remove them from your ears, which is also usually a feature of premium headphones. The omission of those features isn't a huge inconvenience, but it's noticeable in such a competitive market.
Actual pairing can be managed automatically through your phone or Bluetooth device's menu, but the way the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC300TW headphones work is to prefer pairing through the right bud specifically. Audio-Technica provides an app that's well worth installing – more on this shortly – and it rather specifically notes that if you're paired with the left bud, you should unpair and seek out the right bud instead.
Once you're paired, you can then use the Audio-Technica Connect app to modify the settings of the headphones. You can rename them to something that's a little bit less like scrabble spaghetti, but beyond that, the app is the only way to modify the level of noise cancellation that the ATH-ANC300TW headphones employ.
You can switch it on and off from the button controls, but it's only within the app that you can switch between the Airplane, On The Go and Office/Study settings. You can also set the level of external noise that the inbuilt microphones feed through in Hear-Through mode via the app, as well as choose your desired audio codec.
Noise cancellation is a key feature of the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC300TW headphones, but the current coronavirus pandemic has rather constrained my ability to fully test them out in a variety of common environments, and especially for in-flight usage. The closest ad-hoc test I've been able to perform was wearing them while running a paper shredder in my home office, where the Airplane setting performed well. That should, theoretically, be in the scope of the Office/Study setting, but you wouldn't typically sit that close to the paper shredder in most offices, unless your boss really dislikes you a lot.
Audio quality from the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC300TW headphones was generally very good, with solid representation across most musical genres and no particular focus on high or low sound elements. That might not suit you if you do prefer the more bass-heavy tones generally favoured by the likes of Beats, but it gives the ATH-ANC300TW headphones lots of scope for general audio playback.
On The Beatles' Helter Skelter, Ringo Starr's impassioned cry regarding his blisters came through with a genuine sense of pain, as did the heavier overall tone of that track. Prince's Purple Rain gave good prominence to both the guitar and keyboard parts, giving it plenty of emotional oomph. The lighter guitar tones of Willie Nelson's On The Road Again weren't lost in low-end tones, which was appreciated. At this kind of price point, we're seeing more of a light touch when it comes to equalisation, which I do rather like, and the ATH-ANC300TW headphones are a good representation of this kind of approach.