When Traveling, Best Way to Hear CDs...

I used to fly quite a bit and portability was king. I found my best solution was a set of Sony NC-20 noise reduction headphones and a Sony D-335 CD player (an old $300+ model). The noice cancellation could have been more powerful but at it allowed me to listen to music at comfortable levels while flying. For you flyers out there, the BEST earplugs are those translucent gummy ones - much more comfortable and effective than the foam plugs.

jeff, i agree, the senn hd600 are better phones but they make a lot of noise for people sitting next to you on a plane. i've heard that etymotics are suitable (comfortable) for something like 80% of the public. the rest need to get custom fitted earpieces which are super pricey. since there is the 30 refund policy it's worth trying i think. of course, this is all a bit off topic since mcrheist prefers a non-can system. for that i'm stumped. sorry.

I travel a lot and love the Ety's. I have used a radio shack 3400 until recently and went with the creative labs 64mb MP3 player. I can store 100 cd's and no need to carry software. The sound is quite good. This has been a great solution for me.

You can store hundreds of CDs on your laptop. Use Windows Media Player to rip your CDs to WMA (sounds better than MP3). You can also listen to WMA on many of the better MP3 players (Creative Nomad, Diamond Rio, etc.) and PocketPC devcies (Compaq iPaq) when you don't wany to use a laptop.

I agree with the Ets for plane travel. They reduce the noise dramatically. I use them with a headroom airhead amp and a PBJ100 jukebox. This is an MP3 player with either a 6.4 or 20 gig hard disk. Even at low compression rates (which is what I use for better sound quality) it stores a huge amount of music (70 hours on the 6.4 gig version at 192 Kbits/sec). As for playing music in the hotel room I recently bought a pair of the NSX technology speakers on the MP3direct.com website. They were only $89 with the amp, so I figured, why not. How do they sound--like $89. No miracles here. For background music they are adequate. They are better than the speakers in my laptop. They can not play very load (background levels only). They have no response below about 200Hz. They are very compact (about the size of 2 CD cases). So if you just want some mellow background music while you read or work--this may be fine for you--but don't expect audiophile quality for the road with these.