I am presently spending a lot of my time commuting, and the way I help pass the time, whether I am driving or as a passenger is to listen to either music or the podcasts to which I subscribe . I find that what really makes a big difference to the whole listening experience is having a good set of earphones. At one time I didn’t consider that this was a real necessity until at one point when I was using my standard issue earphones, I found that they where getting really uncomfortable after a few hours. So I looked around for a more comfortable pair and ended up being blown away by the improved sound performance.

Another thing that I have discovered is that when you travel as much as me, you end up spending a lot of time trying to get to sleep on airplanes. I have never been good at this, but the biggest challenge I find for this is blocking out the background white noise. I have discovered that a good comfortable pair of noise cancellation earphones is ideal for this, either with the volume turned right down or a low level of background music.

Of course everyones ears are a different shape and the sound quality will vary, with the best quality usually costing a lot more. So my advice is to look around for the best sound performance in your price bracket and the try some out for comfort. A pair that I can recommend are the Shure SE210 Black Sound Isolating Earphones, shown left, which have good performance and are reasonably priced. If you have a no limit budget then for sound quality I think you will find it very hard to beat the Shure SE530 Sound Isolating Earphones, shown above.

How do you manage to get to sleep on planes? I would be interested to hear.