Originally posted by: gwynethgh
SOUND ISOLATING not noise cancellation I believe. Two different things.
You're exactly right. Sound
cancelling headphones produce noise out of phase with ambient sounds to try and cancel them out. To the best of my understanding, they work best with constant background noises (think the droning of constuction or air conditioning or the like). These headphones are sound
isolating headphones physically block out background noise. In the case of these headphones, they sit in you ear canal, and are kind of like a pair of earplugs with speakers inside. Thus, outside sounds are blocked out and you don't have to crank up the music nearly as loud to hear it, even in a noisy place.
I own a set of e3's (by the way the e3's and e3c's are the same thing, just different colors), and like them quite a bit. They have great sound. You really have to get the things seated properly in your ears to have them sound right, though. I find the tips with the earplug style yellow foam are the most comfortable and stay in place the best, but you'll be annoyed really quickly if you need to take them in and out a lot. I decided not to go for the e4's or e5's because I planned to use them primarily with my iPod, and there's not much point in plugging in $500 headphones to listen to compressed music files.
Anyway, I like these quite a bit. I don't know anything about the site that the OP listed above, but I bought mine from
djdeals.com for the same price with free shipping and had no problems. They also have e4's and e5's there, if anyone's interested (note that you need to actually place the items in your cart to see the real price they sell for, rather than just checking the item page itself).