Which meant that everyone around got the tinny dings of your music, so it was quite anti-social and you were asked to turn it down (by family or companions, rarely strangers) which usually meant you couldn't hear it well over the ambient noise and ended up turning it off. Nobody used the big on ear headphones outside the house. The big isolation change for me was better sealed in-ear ones with a digital player, ipod, mp3 etc, where you could exclude the ambient more and have decent quality.