General purchase advice: Ask your questions/for advice here!

I agree totally with @pennstac about ANC headphones, they are great for long droning sounds (such as airplanes etc.) but are not great for general noisy enviroments. Passive noise cancelling, such as IEMs, works much better for these kind of situations.

If you haven’t tried IEMs, then probably something in the cheaper end of the market would be a good starting point. For example, the Aria are a great set of IEMs for their price, check out the Moondrop thread for reviews from myself and others. Here are links to some reviews:

If you want to go cheaper, you can check out the The Ultra Cheap IEM Thread that has lot’s of budget options and reviews, the thread is over 1000 posts long, so maybe start from the end and work back a little looking for photos that usually accompany reviews. Things like the Tanchjim Tanya are great for a very low price.

The isolation of IEMs can vary a lot from brand to brand, and also depends a lot on the tips used. The kings of isolation are Etymotic (which is to be expected as they make hearing protection) and their IEMs get good reviews. The ER2 series is within your $200 budget (at least it is in Europe and US, I don’t know about Panama) and has lots of praise. I personally don’t have experience with Etymotic as I don’t like the deep insertion of IEMs and the Etymotic do have deep insertion, this is something that adds to isolation of course.

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