Telephonic handset employing feed-forward noise cancellation

A method of active noise reduction (ANR), comprising:

• sampling ambient noise adjacent an external surface of a telephonic handset, thereby to provide a reference signal;
• processing the reference signal in a non-adaptive IIR filter, thereby to provide a cancellation signal effective for at least partially canceling ambient noise in the vicinity of the entrance to a user's ear canal;
• and
• feeding the cancellation signal forward to a receiver transducing element substantially without feedback from said element.

A telephonic handset comprising:

• a noise reference microphone configured to sample a noise field at a sampling location and to generate a noise signal in response to the noise field;
• a receiver transducing element;
• a non-adaptive digital IIR filter configured to process the noise signal, thereby to form a noise-cancelling signal;
• and
• circuitry configured to combine the noise-cancelling signal with a far-end speech signal and to forward the combined signals to the receiver transducing element;
• wherein the IIR filter is configured in a fixed feed-forward noise-cancellation system.