I found this article to be worthless. I work in an open office that is fairly noisy. Although we in this area are mostly separated from the call center people (there is only one in this section, probably due to seniority), but there are some developers who are frequently loud, horsing around with nerf guns, etc. My Shure IEMs block all of this easily. People around me have conversations about which headphones they should buy, I show them mine, and then they come back and say they want something with noise-canceling but that doesn't go in their ears. Sorry, you want water that isn't wet, and it can't be helped. Scared about having your back to the unknown? Get over it; it's a personal fear that is able to be corrected. I used to be overly self-self-conscious, but no longer. The One way, which is what worked for me, is to do absolutely nothing distracting while at work. Ant website I view for more than a minute is work-related in some small way and I have no reservations about doing that for as long as I want. Right now I'm typing into a black screen that is not echoing anything that I type back to me, so anyone passing by me is only going to see what appears to be me pretending to type. Let them think that, it doesn't matter to me. A guy to my left just views time-wasting websites all day, every day. He would be the first-fire if I had any say in this, but I don't care about him. Back to the headphones... All of these things that could be described as "earbuds" are junk. They don't seal the ear canal, so you don't get sound isolation, then I would assume if there was noise in the environment's, you would be forced to crank up the volume to compensate. I am listening to classical music from a streaming playlist that is running from an mpd server on my home computer through my phone (unlimited data). There is no distraction, as I have pruned this playlist of opera and . Lyrical music and hip-hop is good, but too much of it and you get the tape loops in your mind that can be distracting.