Coding headphones

Pascal Hakim

Pascal is the Online Director at IDG Australia. With his team, he makes sure that the servers, code and ads that you can see on this page are all doing what they are supposed to. So please let him know if things are broken.

I've been writting code for a long time now, so I realised long ago that I needed a decent pair of headphones to actually be able to code properly. Even if you've managed to get rid of the team of telemarketers next to you, you'll often find it hard to concentrate if there's a lot of office noise around you.

Over the years, I've noticed I've been spending more and more time trying to find the perfect pair of headphones when it comes to what I need to code. Cheaper headphones just don't seem to cut it for a number of reasons...

Comfort: If you're wearing headphones for multiple hours a day (something that's probably bad for your health anyway), the last thing you need is to actually feel discomfort from wearing the headphones. For me, this is all about the actual in-ear part of the headphone having appropriate padding and correct sizing. Headphones with adjustable pads for different ear canal sizes get my vote here.

Weird noises: A lot of the cheaper headphones seem to have some weird high-frequency noises. Even as I get older I find that I can still hear those. For me, they are a sure recipe for a massive headache that will take hours to clear, followed by more headaches as you try to debug that code you wrote before.

Cable length: I've never understood this one. It's either too long or too short. I guess it's related to the iPod remotes that are quite common in the market, but I always find it a bit creepy. Are you supposed to blog your headphones in to your shoe?

Noise cancelling: This is the big one. If you get headphones that can drone out as much as possible of the noise around you, you'll actually be able to concentrate and crank out code as fast as possible. For me, what works best is the noise damping abilities of a set of padded in-ear headphones.

So what am I using these days? A set of T-Jays Threes.

Tags: coding, music