Does any­one have expe­ri­ence with noise can­cel­ing head­phones?  I think I’m going to need some at work pretty soon before I go insane.  I’m sur­rounded by devices with fans.  While the fans are vari­able speed and I can hack the firmware to slow them down (and thereby quiet them down), I can’t run all my switches with low fans for too long with­out wor­ry­ing about things like fire haz­ards.  So I have a con­stant low, but audi­ble and annoy­ing over time, fan hum to deal with.

My pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence with block­ing out noise are those rub­ber jam-them-in-your-ear style.  They hurt my ears pretty quickly, even with the right sized rub­ber thinger on them.  The reg­u­lar ear bud style head­phones work okay, but I need my music/podcasts/French turned up loud enough that, while I stop wor­ry­ing about back­ground hum insan­ity, I start wor­ry­ing about long-term ear dam­age.  Plus, they start to hurt my ears after a while (though I can tol­er­ate them much longer than the jam-them-in-your-ear-canal ones.)

I’d pre­fer to avoid Sony because of their recent adven­tures in rootk­its and I’d pre­fer to keep it under $100 (and actu­ally, $50 is more in my com­fort zone.) I’ve seen some noise can­cel­ing head­phones (Bose) that are $300!  That’s a bit out­landish for me, con­sid­er­ing that’s about the price of a new iPod.

Any­one?  Expe­ri­ences?  Suggestions?

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Tagged as: headphones, noisecanceling