I had a particular need for some noise cancelling.

I work on the top floor of an old building and there is nothing between my workspace and the roof. When it rains, conversations are impossible and in particular, telephone calls are a no-go.

I bought a set of Spracht Konf-x ear buds in the hope that, at least when I am sitting in on a conference call with the mic on mute, I can hear what is going on.

For noise cancelling, they are great. It's like having a power cut at work. All of the computer fan noise is gone. Conversation killing rain is just a background buzz and I can hear phone calls.

For fifty US bucks, they are a great value. You will not get close to the same level of noise attenuation even if you shell out a lot more cash. Remember, these are in-ear devices so they already cut a decent slice off the ambient noise before the active NC kicks in.

What is bad about them then? Two things. With the NR turned on, the sound quality is not great. Thirty bucks worth of skull candy give better quality sound. Quality is better with the NR off but still not great. That does not matter to me at all. I use them for phone calls only. The bigger problem is quality control and customer support. I bought mine from amazon and they arrived in good time but only with the set of tips that were fitted to the buds. These were the large size and they were no more likely to fit into my ears than a couple of ping pong balls. No worries surely, a phone call will fix this issue won't it? Amazon could not help. They offered a refund if I posted the ear-buds back at my own expense and risk but that was a poor deal as far as I was concerned. Surely a call to Spracht in the US would solve all my problems? What a joke. Spracht customer service told me that there was nothing that they could do. They outright refused to post me a set of tips. They said that it was impossible because they did not have any.

I did the obvious and posted a one-star review on amazon. My review immediately gained three down-votes which I suspect came from Spracht representatives and a comment from an account that had never before appeared on amazon reviews telling me to contact Spracht support and giving me their email address. I assume that was a Spracht sock puppet account. A couple of weeks later, I received a set of tips from Spracht customer support. So I can report that the buds work very well for noise cancelling but customer service is only active if you get loud and stroppy on social media.

So, if you want impressive noise cancelling, do not care so much about audio quality and are prepared to take the risk on QA/support issues then this product might help.