I just ordered the lightspeed Light Flight ear plug type headsets- 399.00$
- and already sent them back for a refund. They did not come close to the ANR lightspeeds in reduction of noise and I could not get comfortable with them in my ears. I can wear plain jane foam ear plugs for hours on end with no fuss, so don't know why I couldn't get comfortable with the lightflights.
I will say that when you open the box and look at what you got for your 400 or 500+ bucks, you will slap yourself on the head for it! There is all of 20 bucks worth of stuff there.
I also got a set of lightspeed ANR headsets that work great at blocking noise, and sound decent, but they are so big and bulky that I have to take them off to rest my head for a few minutes, after a hour or so in flight. They also get really hot on your head in a RV type airplane unless you got a high amount of airflow in your cockpit.
I have a friend who has a pair of fairly cheap sigtronics, or some other set that looks like Dave Clark knockoffs. He bought a kit to make them active noise reductions and I have compaired them to my lightspeeds and found them more comfortable and far better at blocking the noise. I think his total investment in each headset is under 300$ converted.
One of the reasons I got the lightspeeds was to listen to music, but unless you got super good hearing and a quiet airplane, you will need a amplifier between your walkman and your headset to really hear the music over all the other noises. You can buy one of these little amps from radio shack, but it is a pain in the butt to have to deal with yet another device just to listen to some tunes. I spent Monday afternoon behind the panel on my 4 installing the wires and a 3.5mm phone jack so I can plug my portable CD player right into my panel and into the planes intercom. The sound comes through plenty loud without the need for a amp, and both stations get equal volume sound - which is hard to do with two different type lightspeeds plugged into the walkman/amp combo directly, The lightflights work well with music and were so good I had to turn the volume down to about halfway while the guy in the backseat wearing my 20Gs could not barely hear the music at all, it was so low he could not tell what he was listening to, just that there was music playing.
I am most likely going to take my old OLD headsets - a flightcom or something like that, and a Pilot - and convert them to ANR and go with these. The Lightspeeds are good products but not for me. Nice thing about them though, is you can try them for 30 days and if not happy send them back for a refund.
