Goodbye, cruel sound.(Surveying The Soundscape)

Goodbye, Cruel Sound: I'm impressed by Shure's new E2c in-your-earphones. These are very interesting and effective noise-reducing phones that work acoustically rather than electronically. In fact, you might think of it as natural rather than artificial noise reduction. The idea is simple: put holes in noise-blocking earplugs that will let the listener hear audio from the attached earpiece elements while nicely attenuating sounds from the rest of the world.

Not only is the idea simple, it's effective. I've lived with a couple of active noise-canceling headphones--the Bose QuietComfort and the Koss QuietZone QZ-2000--and both work quite well. But they share common disadvantages that come along with the electronic approach. One is the need for an interface box to hold batteries and circuitry. That interface means that you can't just plug in the phones and use them the way you can with the Shure phones. Instead, you have to turn them on. And, of course, you must occasionally replace those batteries.

Electronic phones inevitably add a bit of electronic noise of their own and make subtle, but noticeable, changes in the music's timbre. These things seemed like the price one had to pay for effective noise reduction.

But with the Shure phones, you don't have to make any such compromises. There are no active electronics to alter the music while they attenuate ambient noise. You don't have to deal with an interface box or replace batteries. You just put the earpieces in your ears and the plug into your sound device and listen.

Well, actually there's a little more to it than that. The E2c phones come with two different kinds of plastic sleeves--foam and flex--in three sizes each. The varied ...