What is the best tire to buy with the least amount of road noise?

One factor in road noise these days ED1 is the amount of sidewall. If you are using a lower profile tire you are contributing to the problem and you may want to go back to a more traditional design. I have added a quote here (below) from a Google group thread that discusses the factors that feed the noise problem ... And here's a link to Tirerack.com (www.tirerack.com. There you will find plenty of comments from tire owners to help you make a decision ... Hope this helps! "Just looking at the tread pattern, you can usually tell whether a tire is going to be quiet or loud. Notice the size of the blocks in the tread, especially the outer most rows of tread blocks. - If the blocks are all the same size, expect the tires to be very noisy. I see this a lot more today than I did five or ten years ago. - If the blocks are different sizes, and the distribution of sizes appears to be very random, those tires will tend to be much quieter. This used to be the most common design, but it seems to be fairly rare today. - If there are different sizes of tread blocks, but they are lined up from the smallest to the largest in a line of increasing and then decreasing sizes, the tire will be louder than the one with random distribution of block sizes, but not as loud as one with all the blocks the same size. These tires can have an annoying low frequency element to the noise, too. Kind of a "whomp whomp" sound. There are probably exceptions to this visual guide, and some variations within each design type that can change the "noisiness" of the design. But, I've found that as a general rule, these observations of the tread blocks usually are a very good indicator of how loud a tire will be on the road."