These are excellent value. They're light weight and the cups are small. The sound quality is ABSOLUTELY good enough to monitor yourself playing as you record. If you're on a budget and can't afford anything else, listening to music is enjoyable on these, though I wouldn't exactly use them strictly for this purpose. I use them for recording and they put out a pretty hot signal. Noise canceling not because they're designed that way, but noise canceling because I can get them loud enough to drown out the noise of my guitar strings so all I'm hearing is the mix and me.