The Best Electronic Ear Protection For Shooting In 2024

The Best Electronic Ear Protection For Shooting This Year Bar None…

Shooting is a social hobby for many of us. Unfortunately, the loud noise produced by firing guns necessitates the use of hearing protection.

It’s difficult to have a conversation with a friend while wearing ear muffs that muffle sound to almost nothing. The alternative is to risk permanent hearing loss by exposing your eardrums to unsafe levels of noise. Because of this, it’s difficult to socialize at the range.

Electronic ear protection helps solve this issue. By placing a small microphone outside of each ear muff, devices are able to capture stereo sound. It’s then relayed to a speaker on the inside of the cup and played at a safe volume.

The ear muffs still serve to physically dampen sound, meaning that you can hold conversations and hear what you’re doing while wearing your earmuffs.

Passive Ear Protection VS. Active Ear Protection

The complexity involved in this setup compromises the integrity of the ear muff itself. While standard ear muff-style hearing protection can reduce noise by up to 34 dB, electronic ear protection often caps out at around 22-24 dB of noise reduction.

If you want the very best ear protection when it comes to dampening noise, you’ll probably end up with a set of earmuffs that don’t use batteries.

Still, electronic ear protection is more than strong enough for outdoor shooting. It’s okay for indoor range use, too, but you might want to bring some ear plugs in your bag just in case. If you decide it’s still too loud, you can simply wear your ear plugs underneath your electronic ear muffs.

Howard Leight Impact Sport

When it comes to electronic ear muffs, Howard Leight makes some of the best selling sets. The Impact Sport model has 22 dB of noise reduction. It features slim ear cups that are designed with gun stocks in mind.

Both ear muffs run off of 2 AAA batteries. These ear muffs don’t use much power, so you’ll get up to 350 hours of use out of one pair of batteries. With their durable construction, they’ll do just fine on long outdoor excursions.

Like most modern sets of electronic ear protection, the Impact Sport model comes with an aux plug so you can listen to your phone or another device through the internal speakers.

The electronics in the Howard Leights are perfectly serviceable and will allow you to converse with your friends easily. When it comes to ambient noise, however, they’re not the best pair on the market. If you’re trying to track something by sound, for example, you’ll do much better by choosing a different pair.

Overall, the Howard Leight Impact Sport muffs are a great starting choice if you just want to shoot socially outdoors. If you want to shoot indoors or you’re interested in higher sound fidelity, you might want to choose a different pair.

You can read our detailed review of the Howard Leight Impact Sport here.

 

The Peltor Sport Tactical 100

With low profile ear cups that reduce noise by 22 dB, the Peltor Sport Tactical 100 is quite similar to the Howard Leights above. The biggest difference is in audio quality — the Peltors use the same AAA batteries, they’ve got similar low profile cups and they’ve got a similar aux jack for external sound.

When it comes to letting ambient noise through, however, the Peltors have a clear edge. It’s a little bit easier to pick on subtle audio cues with the Peltor’s compression algorithm.

Things aren’t perfect, however. The Howard Leights work by simply not broadcasting noise over a certain volume. The Peltors work differently — instead, they lower the volume of all outside noise for a few milliseconds during and after things get too loud.

You can adjust the release time to your liking, but you’ll still have a brief window after each gunshot where your electronic hearing protection doesn’t amplify sounds for you. For most people, the better sound quality is more than worth this minor hiccup.

The Tactical 100 Hearing Protectors are usually priced competitively with the Impact Sports. If hearing outside noise better is important to you, the Peltors are definitely the ear muffs for you.

You can read our detailed review of the Peltor Sport Tactical 100 here.

The Walker Razor XV Electronic Earplugs

While the Walker Razor XV may look like a normal Bluetooth neck accessory, it’s got ear plugs that provide a whopping 33 dB of noise reduction, which is pretty impressive, to say the least. It’ll still hook up to your phone, too, making it a very convenient accessory at the range.

The capability of making calls while protecting your hearing at the same time is possible with these bad boys. Where else can you get 33 dB of hearing protection from a set of ear plugs?

The biggest downside of the Razor XV is the lack of stereo microphones. Because it only has one microphone, it plays any sounds it picks up in both ears.

This means that you can’t tell if a sound is to your left or right. If you’re trying to use electronic ear protection to preserve your situational awareness while shooting, you’ll want to choose a different device.

Still, purchasing the Walker Razor XV puts your hearing protection on a device you’ll carry around with you a lot. Better still, it lets you understand what people around you are saying while you’ve got the ear plugs in.

This is the most important part of electronic hearing protection for a lot of people. If you want to try using hearing protection that doesn’t weigh a lot and sit on your head or you just need a new Bluetooth accessory for your phone, give the Razor XV some consideration.

You can read more information about the Walker Razor XV here.

Our Verdict

Here at Tactical Ears, we personally prefer using over the head passive type earmuffs for ear protection, especially in indoor situations. However, electronic ear protection has it’s place and is very useful especially in outdoor situations.

We personally like the Peltor Tactical 100’s not so much for the hearing protection specs, but mainly because Peltor is a brand we have come to trust over the years, as well as the low price factor of these muffs in comparison to what you get.

You can purchase the Peltor Sport Tactical 100 straight from Amazon.com by clicking the link graphic below.

---