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Comment by brianmartinek | Hacker News Reader

I recommend the Bose QC headphones. I currently use the QC35 wireless ones but have also used the QC15 and QC25 before that. Open office plans are terrible for my concentration and wearing noise canceling headphones makes a huge difference.

I usually listen to lyric-less music such as Focus@Will, Spotify playlists, or use a white noise generator.

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Came here to say this. I'm not normally a fan of Bose but I wear my QC35 maybe 12 hours a day and have for almost a year.

Excellent build quality, sound, battery life, and above all noise cancelling. I've owned maybe 30 sets of headphones over the years and never had anything like them.

Little known fact is that they make aviation headsets and the QC35 looks by all accounts to be a consumer version of that. Might explain the chasm between their quality vs competitors.

I was debating to buy the QC35 but was disappointed that the battery on these is not replaceable. Designed for obsolescence (why did they design it that way?). So I decided to go for the older QC25 version since that has the same noise-cancelling and is using AAA batteries instead. I don't really need the Bluetooth wireless aspect of it (though the QC25 can be converted to Bluetooth with a mod). Just a tip.

How do they feel on your ears? Not sure if you can relate to this but all headphones I've tried so far end up hurting my ears after a few minutes to a couple of hours of wear. My ears are small-to-average, but stick out slightly and many headphones create uncomfortable pressure there. Is there some space between the actual ear and the ear-cup with these?

The Bose QC series come with a very good "over the ear" variants that don't rest directly on the ear, but instead around it. That comfort issue was bigger to me, personally, than any noise cancelling options. I actually opted against a noise cancelling model because I found the over-the-ear configuration alone cuts down enough noise that I'm happy, and the cost and weight savings was a useful bonus.

I spent hours in a Best Buy trying to find headphones I would be comfortable wearing for hours and the over-the-ear Bose models won out by far as the most comfortable I could find.

Thank you, this is encouraging. I've just ordered the QC35; now hoping for some peace in the open plan office.

Update: Just got these. Where have they been all my working life? These make the open plan office considerably more tolerable.

You should try Brain.fm. I use it with my noise canceling headphones and the experience has been great so far.

I have a similar lightweight script I wrote [1] to generate white noise (actually brown noise) to concentrate when the office is busy.

There are a few other similar alternatives at the bottom of the readme, which I'll copy here for convenience:

- A Soft Murmur

- Brain.fm

- Coffitivity

- GitHub Audio

- Hipstersound

- Noisli

- Noizio

- SimplyNoise + SimplyRain

- Spotify playlists in the Focus section e.g., Ambient Chill, Deep Focus, or Music for Concentration

- Vicinity

- zenmix.io

[1]: https://github.com/tedmiston/zero-noise

http://somafm.com has some good instrumental channels, too. I also have a playlist of things I've curated from Magnatune over the years, there are some strong instrumental artists over there.

I recommend the same, though I use amazon music with taiko drumming. In the US, I used pandora.

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