For the many millions of people that have an Mp3 player or Ipod, having to get new earbuds is just something you will have to do at some point in time. The earphones you received with your digital music player may not be of good enough quality for your liking, the earbuds break or they may simply be lost.
Poor quality earbuds are supplied with many mp3 players that you can buy. It is just part of the deal. Breaking your earbuds is also common. Either they just give out at some point or they meet with some disaster. Just yesterday for instance I was walking in my neighborhood and I crossed paths with one lonely earbud sitting in the gutter. It had a tiny remnant of wire hanging off of it.
Faced with searching around for new earphones and coming across what may be some strange terms, what kind of choice should one make? That depends on a few factors. First there is quality and price to consider. If you have $500 to spend than going with best the best earbuds you can find (perhaps the $1,000 + Ultimate Ears UE-11 or the $599 Westone 3 New 3-way Driver Earbuds), cost be damned, is fine. The sound will be fabulous and it is also likely they will be outfitted nicely enough to block out environmental noise. If you are like most people though you do not have that kind of dough to be shelling out for new earphones. Perhaps you would like some wireless earphones? That will be saved as a subject for another post for now.
For me, I like to have earbuds that are decent quality and have some kind of means of getting rid of environmental noise. This means they can either be noise canceling earbuds or noise isolating earbuds (which may also be called noise blocking earbuds). What is the difference between these two kinds of earphones? Lets take a look.
Noise canceling is not new. Most people associate this technology with airplane flight – noise canceling earphones provided a means of blocking out the sound of a plane engine when you are flying somewhere. A whining jet engine can be eliminated from your hearing it, making a plane flight more pleasant and relaxing. The only problem is that noise cancelling tends to work best for steady low-frequency sounds. For other problems we need noise blocking.
Voices and other sounds are not blocked well by noise cancelling but can be eliminated by stopping the sound from ever reaching your eardrum. The trick in having this work well is to have a nice fit of our earbuds to your own ears. This is where noise isolating earphones come in. Smartly made noise isolating earbuds can also have both noise cancelling and noise isolating to take full advantage of all the possibilities.
It is great we have such technology available to us today. If you have a need to block out sounds and can listen to music or other audio while you do this, some nice best noise cancelling earphones or noise isolating earphones might be just what you need.