A binaural telepresence system includes two communication devices, and two sets of active noise reducing headphones having an active noise-cancelling mode and an active hear-through mode, coupled to the respective communication devices and configured to provide left and right feed-forward microphone signals to the communication devices. The first communication device is configured to transmit the first left and right feed-forward microphone signals to the second communication device. The second communication device is configured to provide the first left and right feed-forward microphone signals to the second set of headphones. The second set of headphones are configured to apply first filters to the first left and right feed-forward microphone signals to compensate for the specific frequency response of the feed-forward microphones of the first set of active noise reducing headphones; reproduce the filtered first left and right feed-forward microphone signals so that a user of the second set of headphones hears ambient noise from the environment of the first set of headphones, and wherein the filtering of the first left and right feed-forward microphone signals results in the user of the second set of headphones hearing the ambient noise from the first set of headphones with ambient naturalness.