In my continuing attempts to keep from killing the people around me, I’m trying another way to blot out the noise around me.
At the Apple Store before Christmas, I tried out the Bose noise cancelling headphones. Just like their aviation headphones, they were awesome, light, and way too freaking expensive . They’re around $300, which I suppose is a bargain compared to the Series X aviation headphones which are around $1000, and have been since they invented the concept of ANR (Automatic Noise Reduction) in aviation headphones. The aviation ones haven’t budged in price in 10 years, so I don’t expect to see the music ones getting drastically reduced either.
So I compromised and bought myself a pair of Sony MDR-NC6 headphones. These are semi-open like the original Walkman headphones, but with a battery compartment in the bow just above the right ear.
You put them on your head and flick the switch. The first thing you notice is that you can no longer hear the air noise in the overhead HVAC system, nor the three computers sitting right behind your head on the desk behind you. Then you turn on the iPod and find you can use a much lower volume setting. Not sure if that’s because everything got quieter, or because the iPod got louder. Even near-by conversations are muted. Hey, I don’t feel like punching the guy using his speaker phone to check his voice mail. Much. This is good! And no sore ear canal from ear buds that don’t fit very well.
There are a couple of downsides, though:
- I don’t think the bass response is very good.
- The battery compartment presses into my head annoyingly after a lot of hours of continuous use.
- I don’t know how long the battery lasts yet – that might be an issue.
- When you’re walking around, if you don’t turn off the noise cancelling you get a very loud wind noise in your ears. I have no idea why.
I bought one of the Bose ANR headphones you mention. It has been running on its first and only AAA battery for months, for perhaps 50+ hours of usage. Audio quality is excellent – no complaints about the bass or the fit (though I don’t know just how much you might like).
The sensation of disappearing ambient noise is a revelation.
The battery compartment presses into my head annoyingly after a lot of hours of continuous use.
You probably need some kind of padding. Something thin, but tough … you don’t want it to get scraped away by the headphones. Not just in one spot, because the headphones are going to slide around a bit, right? And most padding is just going to flop around, you need something malleable, that you can sort of wrap around a bit so it’s not annoying. I know! Tin foil! Perfect! Then you’ll have the kind of privacy you need.
Your helpful friend,
Ian
I bought a pair of cheap muffs (Howard Leightning NRR 29, about $25-$30) to gain some quiet in the open office environment. Seems like most muffs are designed to cut off high frequencies, but let speech frequencies through – i.e. industrial situations where you need to be able to hear a safety warning. It was hard to find one that would be an effective conversation blocker. (I looked briefly into the cancelling types, but too rich for me.)
They aren’t powered, but do an effective job – HVAC and computer hum disappear; and talk, while still there, recedes far enough into the background that it becomes unintelligible.
Mr. “Hacknot” has a good article on the lunacy of paying people for their thoughts, and then putting them into an environment that seems designed to destroy all possibility of coherent, sustained thought:
http://www.hacknot.info/hacknot/action/showEntry?eid=78
When I first started out (many decades ago) everybody was in offices, max two people. Within a few years, I got my own. Since then, back into open offices, and the acreage just gets larger and larger.