About Where's the Noise

Where's the Noise answers one question: which headphones to buy for the place you actually listen. A plane, an open-plan office, a train, a pavement, a kitchen full of children, a treadmill. The answer changes completely between them, and most buying guides start from the brand instead.

Two sources of evidence, both labelled. The first is published measurement: RTINGS, who buy headphones and measure isolation on an instrumented head, plus SoundGuys, What Hi-Fi? and Tom's Guide, who publish their own test methods. Where they have a figure, we use theirs and name them on the card.

The second is our own listing desk. On Oct 25, 2026 we captured 82 live listings covering 16 models and compared every variant of each model against itself. That is how we found a $118 gap between two colours of the same Sony headphone on the same day. It is original data, we refresh it, and it is the part of this site that saves readers the most money.

Links to Amazon are affiliate links. They are labelled, they cost you nothing, and they do not set the order of the list. The pick we push hardest on value is last year's model, which pays us less than the flagship.