Headphones! 2

Ari, one of my hosts, said the other night that my (Panasonic) phones must be really good, that he'd been yelling at me from the kitchen and I didn't hear them. I don't know if he could have been yelling that loudly, but they certainly obscured something. And they're working pretty well now, there are Fanw and two kids six feet in front of me, and a bunch of gamers 10 feet away, but mostly I hear Christopher Franke.

If nothing's playing then there's some attenuation but not much blockage, not as much as earplugs, maybe. But with sounds, I mostly hear the sound.

Maybe I'm playing it too loudly. But that seems unlikely, I've never been a high volume guy. One of those people cursed with sensitivity to faint sounds, physical flinching from loud ones, but impairment in understanding speech...