Headphones. Generally speaking, the bigger the driver is the bigger the sound stage is. This should help you separate sounds, pinpoint locations and so forth. I haven't used many earbuds, but the ones I tried sound very tinny and the frequency responses were not very good. They are great for isolation, but you sacrifice quality in my experience.
I wonder if there is a cheap alternative for making some home-made helicopter style isolation headphones. I'm sure covering some regular headphones with two dozen alternating layers of duct tape and corrugated cardboard would help :D Sure you might look like a moose but who's gonna have the last laugh!?
Edited by quake is potat at 09:58 CDT, 23 March 2013
how about ear protection stuff like they use at construction sites, shooting ranges and others, then use in-ear phones inside them. Doesn't get cheaper than that really.
For home use I wouldn't go the cheap ass route: just buy good isolation instead. Spending on your home is an investment, which is a rare thing these days that every product is disposable and loses value after a short while.
Yeah well as long as you don't live on a street with heavy traffic or right next to a noisy venue I don't see the need of having anything other than standard headphones while at home. I was thinking about LANs for the homemade noise-blockers.
Then get what vinegartaster said, which is the same as I wrote but with a link. Those things are absurdly cheap in price, but haven't tried one in person to see if they are surprisingly cheap to wear and use.
As far as i know the ear protection made for construction sites specifically doesn't block or frequencies so that you can still hear human speech in case of emergencies etc. So not very useful for lan usage.
This is true for a lot of them. Mostly the more expensive ones are designed that way, but from my experience the cheaper all-purpose earmuffs block out everything. If they're designed to only block low/mid frequencies and allow speech to be heard, they'll usually include that in their product description/advertising.
really easy to make, just pop off the ear piece and throw some headphones in there. This is my work set .. http://i.imgur.com/tOXgnMD.jpg .. its filthy and hooked up to a bluetooth reciever (obv dont use for gaming b/c delay but its nice when doing work shit) .. but they're easy and cheap to make. but yeah id suggest a headset i have the popular ath m50's as well as the some grado 325's. usually use the m50s for games.
They have 2 soundcards they send audio from quake to soundcard number one then out through headphones and on to soundcard number two that outputs in the earbuds so they get more sound(makes it easier to (almost like 5.1 sound) to hear the enemy).
This sounds like a joke but try listening to the same audio source (eg radio, slightly delayed is best) using earphones and speakers simultaneously. Bizzare effect.