I have to agree these headphones are great, they are comfortable to wear on long flights and they really cut out the engine noise without completely isolating you. The sound then becomes the world you slip into. I took a long haul flight and found them excellent, even when not playing music or listening to an audiobook I found myself wearing them to cut out background noise. When playing music, I could enjoy it at a lower volume because it was not competing with the background, which must be better for my ears. For the money they are worth every penny
 

Wow - I cant believe that other review - I bought a pair of these a couple of months ago and think they're awesome! I bought them to use on a flight I was taking to New York and...what a difference!! Cant say I've noticed any sound leakage at all - in fact, the opposite. I bought these based on a review I saw in GQ where they were up against a few other models and came out top. Since then, I saw that they were awarded Best Headphone of 2007 buy Computer Shopper and PC User Mag. Anyone looking for a great sounding pair of noise cancelling headphones without spending Bose type of money cant go wrong if you ask me!
 

I have owned a pair of Logitech noise cancelling headphones for about a year now and was very happy with them until recently one of the speakers on them stopped working. With Logitech discontinuing them, I was forced to find a new Noise-Cancelling headphones. After extensive research and reading lots of posts and reviews on-line, I was lead to believe that Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7 is the best bang for the buck. Unfortunately I am less then pleased with their performance. Pros: - Look great - Nice carrying case, all though no-one can touch the Logitech’s, not even Bose. - The phone jacks are gold plated, although I really can’t tell the difference when comparing the sound with the use of regular phone jacks. - Noise cancelling is really good, no white noise like on Logitech’s. Cons: - If you have big ears, these are not for you, I have average size ears and these headphones snugly cup over my ears. - When on, create a suction effect on your ears, feel a bit weird, a pit of a vacuumed effect. - Even though they fit really snug and even create a vacuumed effect as I stated above, headphones have a really bad noise leakage. I mean bad, half the sound comes out form the outside of the headphones, I am not over exaggerating. - Poor, Poor, Poor sound quality, especially when there is base. I really believe that this is not because of poor technology of the speaker in the headphones, but because of such large amount of noise leakage. To elaborate, when all the noise leaks out it is picked up by the noise cancelling sensors on the outside of the headphones and creates a distortion in sound. My ears are very sensitive and I can really well the imperfections in sound and these headphones are just driving me crazy. I have to say that even Logitech, who is not known for making good sound equipment, has better sounding headphones then Audio-Technica. Audio-Technica might make great sounding audio equipment; noise canceling is not their nitch, at least not yet. These headphones need lots of work on getting them more sound insolated.