There's a variety of obvious reasons why making the jump from piston-twin to regional jet is an exciting transition, but the potential to toss the heavy headgear in favor of a lightweight, non-head-crimping, non-tear-your-ear-off-your-head-when-you-remove-it headset is among the most anticipated. After a few thousand hours, I was looking forward to a peaceful, quiet cockpit, and the opportunity to pack up that clunky and obtrusive set I'd learned to fly with for the occasional smash-and-go or hundred-dollar hamburger with friends.Anyone who flies the Embraer 145 is chuckling right now. That sucker is loud in the front. Really loud. Everyone's theory seems to be that they took the trusty Brazilia cockpit design, glued it to the front of a longer tube, and slapped some jet engines to make it go twice the speed. Whoever thought of this had not considered the increase in wind noise in the front, which is, well, overwhelming.So my dreams of ditching the David Clarks had to be put on hold for a little while longer. I had tried a friend's Telex 750, and although I loved how comfortable it was to wear, I couldn't hear communications very well. And I came home with a headache at the end of the day because of all of the noise. He compensated for this by always wearing a set of earplugs, but that grew equally uncomfortable in short order. At the same time, the conventional headsets tended to be overly adequate, as the cockpit wasn't as loud as, say, a Baron or Seneca cockpit, and didn't need quite as much sound-proofing as they had been engineered to produce.It would be nice if there was something with a bit more capability to reduce noise without acting as a head-vice to accomplish it. The thought had crossed my mind at one point that if there was a way to take a headset as lightweight as the Telex 750, give it the Active Noise Reduction (ANR) capabilities available in many popular "full-size" models, and offer it at a reasonable price, it would perfectly accommodate the niche in the market for people flying equipment that isn't quiet or loud enough to warrant using the headsets built for the most quiet or most loud of cockpits
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/ownership/telex-airman-850