[mdavidn]

My building has this too. I wear noise cancelling headphones with no music to eliminate the white noise.

[teach]

I have bad news for you -- those noise-cancelling headphones are "eliminating" the white noise by bombarding your ears with an equal and opposite white noise

[pavon]

There is nothing bad about that. The opposite phased sounds it plays genuinely do cancel out the vibrations from the original noise, decreasing the magnitude of the vibrations hitting your ear drum.

[mdavidn]

Right. I know how they work. The fact of the matter is that the work space sounds significantly quieter when I enable that “bombardment.”