As someone who's been dealing with a snoring partner and thin apartment walls for months, I've been going down the sleep earbud rabbit hole — and the more I read, the more I think most people are evaluating the wrong things when they compare them.
Snoring is a strange sound for ANC to deal with because it's not steady. It shifts in volume, stops, starts again at a different pitch, so cancellation doesn't handle it the same way it handles engine hum or HVAC.
Apartment noise is its own separate category. Footsteps, doors slamming at midnight, traffic coming through a window, neighbors having a conversation through a wall. those all behave differently, and different solutions work better for different sources.
The thing I keep coming back to is that most ANC earbuds are built for daytime contexts. They work on planes or in noisy coffee shops. Sleeping in them is an entirely different test. Does it press into your ear when you roll over? Does it stay in place through the night? Can you set an alarm without waking up whoever's next to you? Is it still comfortable after five or six hours?
the way I'd split the options: Foam earplugs if the goal is cheap blocking and you don't need any audio. White noise machine or speaker if the sound is room-level and your partner is okay with it playing all night. Regular ANC earbuds if you mainly need them for travel and only occasionally sleep with them. Sleep earbuds if the main use is overnight comfort and sound masking.
that's where something like Soundcore Sleep A30 makes more sense to me than just forcing regular commuter earbuds into a sleep use case. It's not competing with Bose or Sony on ANC power. It's built around overnight use: thin fit, snoring masking, sleep sounds, alarm setup that works when you're lying down. I'll be honest that very loud snoring probably still gets through on bad nights, it's not a miracle fix. but it's the right category of product to be looking at.
Has anyone tried earbuds specifically for snoring? Did they actually help, or did comfort become the dealbreaker before you could even find out?