Boy howdy is my neighborhood loud. I live in a college town, in a historic neighborhood that has the misfortune of lying between the university campus and ground-zero for the city’s college bars.

Every night except maybe Sunday, starting around 11:00 P.M., thousands of college kids stream to the bars. Every morning around 3:00 A.M. they stream back. Drunk.

They’re noisy.

So I’ve invested in white-noise machines. Lots of them. I’ve got two in my bedroom, one in the guest bedroom and even one in the living room.

If I turn them all on at the same time and dial them up to their max settings, I can bathe my house in a soothing drone that goes a long way toward canceling out the hoots, hollers, cheers and wails of drunken 20-somethings.

Over the years I’ve become a white-noise afficionado. I can describe the advantages of white noise over the coarser orange or even brown noise. And I can recommend the best affordable brands for your own noise-canceling needs. Upfront, these are Dohm, Dreamegg and LectroFan.

Noise-making sleep aids are popular in America. Five percent of the people the nonprofit Sleep Foundation polled reported using a “sound conditioner.” In 2005 the journal Sleep Medicine published a study for which researchers exposed sleepers to recorded hospital sounds.

Some of the sleepers got a white-noise machine to help them sleep. The rest didn’t. “Their analysis of the sleepers’ brain waves found that those who slept with the white-noise machine were hardly disturbed by the hospital sounds, while sleep arousals were frequent among those who slept without white noise,” Time reported.

Which is not to say everyone should use noise-machines to help them sleep. A study in the JAMA Otolaryngology journal found that white noise can worsen the symptoms of tinnitus, that chronic ringing in the ears that afflicts millions of Americans.

For many of us, however, noise-machines can be lifesavers. But there’s no need to spend more than $50 on any one of the devices. There are at least three solid models for around $30. Spend a little more and you can get ones with built-in nightlights and other features.

I don’t need the night-light, so I recommend the original Dohm, the lower-end Dreameggs and the basic LectroFan.

Dohm noise machines have been around since the 1960s. Made my Marpac in North Carolina, they’re simple, reliable and analogue.

Rather than producing sounds digitally, the plug-in Dohm contain fans like miniature air-conditioners. You adjust the tone and volume by activating one of two fan-speed settings then twisting the external shell to grow or shrink the machine’s aperture.

The result is a very mellow white noise that doesn’t contain any weird electronic tones. But if there’s a downside, it’s that even at its loudest setting the Dohm is fairly quiet compared to the more modern, electronic noise machines.

The Dreamegg D3 from the Hong Kong company of the same name is typical of the more modern models. It dials up much louder than the Dohm does. You can plug it in or run it on batteries. In addition to white noise it produces a wide range of “sleep sounds” including cricket chirps, bird songs and the crashing of waves.

Since I value simplicity and reliability, I actually prefer fewer options on my sound machines. But I need volume to drown out those stumbling, howling drunkards. So I actually prefer the older, base-model machine from California-based LectroFan over any of the Dreameggs. 

It’s a plug-in model like the Dohm is but it produces its noise electronically like the Dreameg does. It has just a few tone settings. No fancy bird calls or ocean sounds. And it’s loud.

Not the bad kind of loud like two vodka-soaked college kids breaking up on my front lawn. But loud like a cozy sonic blanket. It covers you and helps you sleep.

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels  War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.