In this age of smart cards, smartphones and "i" this-n-that, you might wonder what value an electronic gizmo not linked by satellite, Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, GPRS, GSM, WMD, or even a string connected to a soup can would be to a traveler. I wondered too, when I first eyed the WikiReader, which crams the entire text of Wikipedia, 3 million-plus articles, into a palm-sized device. (A journalist acquaintance came up with the ultimate pickup line to describe it: "I've got the knowledge of the world in my pants...wanna see it?")

Probably a dozen or so airline freebie headphones have seen the dreaded inner sanctum of my briefcase and come out a mess. So it doesn't break my heart to plug these flimsly mangled contraptions into the TV jack of the cardio machines at the gym then hand them off to another sweaty news junkie, never to see them again.

But the Sennheiser PXC300 noise-cancelling headphones are in a entirely different class.