White Noise Machine Recommendations

White noise machines come in many brands, each having in turn many models resulting in a bewildering array of machines with varying degrees of quality, features and price. We will try to cut through some of the clutter with reviews and offer you our recommendations to help you find the best white noise machine for your needs.

In my view, a baby is a really good judge of the effectiveness of a white noise machine. The baby is unbiased, doesn't have an agenda, doesn't care about anything but the real effect. Have you ever noticed how readily a baby falls asleep in a car with the engine running but when you pull into the drive and turn off the engine, the baby wakes right up? You are witnessing the effectiveness that white noise can have on the auditory system of a baby. The baby hasn't been conditioned to like or dislike certain sounds; the baby hasn't been convinced that a particular sound is better. The baby is about as close as we can get to a true impartial judge on the effectiveness of a white noise machine. We can draw on our experiences with babies falling asleep to draw some conclusions about the likely effectiveness of some types of sound machines.

We noticed babies seem to easily fall asleep with a soft mechanical hum. In the example above, the car was like a white noise sound machine, providing a soft mechanical hum. Taking our clue from the baby, the only sound machine that uses an actual motor to make a soft fan like mechanical hum is the Sleep Mate 980-A by Marpac.

There are a couple drawbacks to the Sleep Mate, one is that it does not go to a loud volume, the other is that it only makes one kind of sound, the fan like mechanical sound mentioned above. So if you want more variety in the sounds produced and the option of having a louder volume, the Sound Oasis S-650-01 would be our recommendation for a quality white noise sound with lots of variety and a good speaker capable of high volume.

Tl;Dr If you like a simple fan sound, the Sleep Mate 980-A is your best choice. If you would like a good digital machine with clean sound and lots of variety, the Sound Oasis S-650-01 is your best choice.