Join Date: May 2002
Location: Pittsburgh
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Posts: 31,650
When you are not listening to music, they are just earplugs.
They don't drown out anything, they just block sound out. Stick your fingers, or a wad of cotton, in your ears - that's about what you get.
As with any barrier-type NR system, it blocks high frequencies better than low.
I wrap my ER-6's with a pair of PlaneQuiets, which are active muff-type NR headphones (I've never actually listened to music through them.). They provide additional barrier isolation, and then use active noise cancelling to attack the low frequencies.