hearing protection

[SLP]

After reading Stryd's story about hearing loss, I became curious and wanted to know what the "pros" (yes, I mean you guys :)) are using for protecting their ears from loud noise/music.

I'm using those at the moment. The sound is really good, but even the golden filter doesn't damp enough. (I'm just 3 meters away from the drummer)

(link, click on the picture for a closeup of the frequency/damping table)

I wanted to buy some special plugs a week ago, but the guy said that 27,7 dB damping @2khz is the absulote maximum, so even those special plugs who are being adapted to your ear don't help in case of a hyperactive drummer.

The next step would be to completely close the ears with common earplugs, but that'll sound pretty awful  :-\

So, what kind of hearing protection do you use and what do you recommend?

[DavidBanner]

I use these: http://www.etymotic.com/pdf/erme-instructions.pdf

they are custom made for your ears - after a freaky fitting session where they fill your ears with plastic!

They are great for cutting through muddy systems and you can hear a lot more clearly without your ear compressing. I can hear people perfectly on any dancefloor....

but even these aren't gonna save your ears from a continuous loud noise source - you MUST take breaks away from the noise...

[stryd_one]

they are custom made for your ears - after a freaky fitting session where they fill your ears with plastic!

Yeh my audiologist has this service too - I think most of them do now :) You can use the same moulds to get custom plugs for you etys or for LiveWires etc, but they can also do customised plastic plugs to give a custom frequency response... Ultimately, they make everything still a 'flat' response, so having them in sounds exactly the same as without them, only quieter.

[audiocommander]

I'm using quite cheap HiFi plug from hearsafe. Nothing is worser than listening to loud and dull music :-)

The downside to all of those earplugs is that the low waves still can hurt something - they are usually a lot louder than we think they are and sensed by the whole auricle...

Maybe the best earprotection would be, to get rid of all these crazy deaf sound engineers who try to compensate missing audience with increased volume  :P

[seppoman]

I've got custom made ear plugs from Elacin http://www.audia-akustik.de/otoplastik_elacin.0.html. They were quite expensive (about 170 Euros) but really worth the money. you can get different filters with -9, -15 and -25 dB that sound almost linear. Very good for extended band rehearsals and clubbing. You can exchange the filters for in ear monitoring phones (I don't have these). The downside is that you still have a strange feeling while it's silent in the room like with any other plugs, so I wanted to remove them in every break or while discussing things with band members. Of course they're not suitable for mixing and I mostly didn't use them while playing a concert, but these (or similar, e.g. Hearsafe also offers custom plugs) are really the best way to protect hearing for musicians and 170 Euros is not much in exchange to not getting deaf at the age of 40 :)

S