Has anyone found a sound isolation tier list for audiophiles/enthusiast?

Headphones Headphone Discussion / Help
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Excluding Etymotics which isolate better than a lot of dedicated hearing protection, my DT770s isolate better than any head/earphone I’ve ever owned, but with stock pads I just had a short phone conversation without taking them off my head. If that phone call was any longer I’d have taken my DTs off for comfort, not an inability to hear.

Etymotics are great if you wanna listen to a podcast while mowing the lawn or at a private shooting range (please don’t do that shit around other people and you should still wear over ear hearing protection. If I can find the article explaining why you should always wear over ear hearing protection I’ll link it) but they still sound mediocre IMO and are easily the least comfortable IEMs I’ve ever owned. I suspect that my DTs will perform well enough to drown out the world with classical instead of metal or EDM when my Dekoni leather pads show up but it’d be nice to have some sort of list to compare to.

Sound isolation seems like it would be a relatively easy thing to measure and quantify. I’m reasonably certain that every reputable company that makes hearing protection for use with firearms, loud equipment, by DJs, etc, already does this in a scientific way, but outside of SEO garbage I can’t seem to find a list for music enthusiast and what different people find acceptable levels of isolation seems to vary.

I’d imagine a list of the best and worst isolating headphones in various categories that’s more granular than “buy Etymotics if you work with power tools” and “buy bone conducting if you need a NY state compliant driving headset” would be useful to a lot of folks.

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I think any IEM with relatively deep insertion and foam tips like Comply will do a great job. Before I bought my Etys (disagree about the sound), I had a pair of Fischer DBA-02 that I loved but sadly lost. They were almost as good as the Etys for isolation because they were relatively deep, and I wore them with Comply tips.

I also own a pair of DT770s and found them to offer excellent isolation.

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Felt obliged to update here:

I recently was abroad and discovered too late that my hotel was next to a club that was open all night. I couldn’t sleep at all…the foam earplugs the airline had given me didn’t seem to help. Then at maybe 4:00am I remembered my Etys and jammed them in my ears. That did the trick. I slept well after that.

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Rtings.com measures sound isolation of various IEMs, earbuds and headphones. They measure how much dB of external noise is blocked and display it on a graph where you can see how much of a given frequency can measured headphone block. I think this is the closest thing to what you mean.

You can add noise isolation category and sort by it. The graph I mentioned is available in singular reviews (click on headphone’s name to jump to review).

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