- isolate you from external noise
- isolate your co workers from your music (a problem with most alternative designs of headphones)
And if you listen to classical music, you are unlikely to suffer any hearing loss. And I find it to be perfect to focus on something in noisy environment (used them when I wanted to focus on something on a trading floor for years).
http://en-uk.sennheiser.com/earphones-headphones-sound-isola...
"classic music hearing loss" (sorry my phone browser copies google urls as plain text).
As for me, having something in ears is already disturbing, especially for a long time. In my office we came to mostly-silence mode without even negotiating on that. That culture was accepted naturally after quick inter-assimilation. People just respect silence and it is great.
Now everyone is different and I am sure some people find it more comfortable to focus while listening to heavy metal!
I wear my headphones as earplugs on an airplane when I want to sleep, and I can usually keep my volume at 10% of max or less and hear everything crystal clear.
The biggest downside is that my headphones cost $350 and are only available in Europe or Montreal, CA.
But be warned, their customer support is terrible if you don't live in Europe.
They cost more than I paid for my top end AudioTechnica's.
(For a while I thought things like Coffivity were a good idea to restore the ambient noise I was killing out with perpetual headphones...but then I realized what I was doing to myself, and felt kind of ashamed and embarrassed.)
My experience is different. I'm a person who is very sensitive towards noise (even in the classroom writing tests was horror). I personally consider silent environment + good noise canceling headphone (for silencing all the remaining noises that are still there - you are surprised how many there are) as comforting. The static noise that any noise-canceling headphone will produce is the smaller evil here.
For https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raziel2701
> Noise canceling headphones are much more effective on constant noise like an airplane engine than transient noises like speech or phones ringing.
Also my experience. They decrease the noise of speech and phones rining, but that's it.
This isn't a solution. Wearing headphones all day will lead to hearing loss. Especially if you have them turned up to any sort of level needed to block out even light conversation.