I thought ANC headphones were best for office work. I was wrong

I used to think closed-back headphones were the obvious choice for work or studying. They’re what I see most people wearing in coffee shops and libraries while working on their laptops, which makes sense since they isolate you from others and block out sound with active noise cancelation. I expected them to be the best tool for the kind of stationary listening I do while typing all day, so I used them for a while. Then one day, on a whim, I started using a pair of wired, open-back headphones instead, and since then, I’ve never gone back. It was one of the most surprising game-changers, improving both my comfort and focus.

Hear me out. When you’re wearing headphones for 8 hours a day, they need to be comfortable. Closed-back headphones seal against your ears, and that seal traps heat. A couple of hours into a workday, that adds up. Open-back designs don’t have that problem because, well, they are open: sound and air pass through the ear cups instead of bouncing around in a sealed chamber. The HiFiMan Sundara I’ve stuck with also have large, roomy ear cups with plush cushions, which gives my larger ears room to breathe. After a full day at a desk, especially in the summer, that difference is hard to ignore.

Open backs mean very little isolation at the tradeoff of more natural-sounding music.

The bigger shift, however, is how open-back headphones changed my relationship to the room around me. Closed-back headphones with ANC are built to shut the world out, which is exactly what I want on a bus or train while commuting to work, where outside noise is annoying. But at my desk, I quickly realized I needed to be aware of my surroundings, for example, if a coworker came up to my desk with a question. At first, I would have to toggle ANC on my headphones or put them into Adaptive mode, so they would switch to Transparency mode as soon as I or someone else started speaking. Even then, I would find myself slipping one earcup off to hear them better. Eventually, it hit me: why not just cut out the middleman altogether?

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Open-back headphones have a more natural, built-in “transparency mode” by design, afterall. I can hear a coworker walk up to ask a question, or someone in another room calling my name, or the doorbell ring with a new product arriving for testing, all without needing to pull my headphones off or fumble with buttons or touch controls to turn off ANC. I remain approachable without touching my headphones at all.

Altogether, open-back headphones have become my main tool for listening to music indoors. Of course, that doesn’t mean open-back headphones will be better for everyone everywhere. If you are listening at higher volumes, they can leak sound, which anyone nearby may hear, and they do nothing to block out noise, so they won’t help you if your office or home environment isn’t quiet. But for the kind of stationary work I do, open-back headphones never leave my desk.