I've said this before - on the older planes, the white noise hides the human-generated noise (carts, galleys, crying, snoring, coughing, talking etc) and good noise cancelling earphones kill the white noise completely leading to a very quiet flight. I don't listen to anything through them, just cancel all the ambient noise. Bliss!

Some of the noisiest flights I've been on have been on the 380 and 787 where there's no engine noise to mask the human noise, and noise cancelling technology doesn't really work for that either.