As John said, these are great if your air requirement is constant and at say 60%-80% of the capacity of the unit you choose. If your air use is intermittent then you are much better off with another type of compressor. First thing you need to know is what is your usage requirement. If it’s under 5cfm on a normal basis, you’d be better off with a Jun or Sil-Air type unit, they use scroll compressors like what are found in AC units and they run pretty much silent. To get a lot of CFM, you will need a unit with maybe 4 or 6 compressor heads though as they don’t produce a whole lot of CFM per head. The unit pictured below puts out 6.36cfm.

If you want to spray, or use air tools, these generally won’t keep up, so better to have a larger piston compressor for those times when you need volume. They make some units now in the 5hp and 60 to 80 gallon tanks that are specifically designed to run quieter, they use large pumps at lower rpm and tend to have silencers on the air intake, which is where most of the noise comes from. This is a unit that uses Eaton compressor heads, puts out 19cfm.