What Shooting Hearing Protection Is Right For You?

Understand The Best Hearing Protection You Need For Shooting

Guns are really loud. As someone who spends a lot of time around guns, I can’t overstate this enough. Outside, guns are more than loud enough to damage your hearing unless you’re wearing hearing protection.

Shooting at an indoor range is even louder, as the closed space amplifies the sound. Because of this, it’s necessary for shooting enthusiasts to use the best hearing protection available to keep their ears safe.

With a variety of options available on the market, however, it can be tricky to choose the best shooting hearing protection. Most shooters don’t speak the specialized language used by to describe earmuffs.

People ask me what a decibel is all the time. This article will try to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the hearing protection that’s marketed towards shooters.

Understanding Sound Scales

Our ears do not perceive a sound that carries twice as much energy as being twice as loud. Instead, we perceive it as just a little bit louder.

This is why the volume controls on your electronic devices seem weird so often. The programmers use a software library with linear scale and forget that our brains use a logarithmic one.

Decibels are a logarithmic scale as well. This means that going up or down by just a few decibels is quite a big difference in terms of sound energy and how much damage a sound can do to your ears.

A difference of 3 decibels can double or half the amount of energy carried by sound. This means that ear muffs that block 30 dB of sound are twice as good as ear muffs that block 27 dB.

Going from 22 (the lower end of acceptable protection for outdoor shooting) to 37 dB (the higher end of consumer ear muffs) of noise reduction means that energy reaching your ears is reduced by a factor of roughly 30.

This doesn’t mean you should buy the hearing protection with the highest noise reduction rating (NRR). Instead, it means that you should value small increases in NRR highly.

The best hearing protection is the kind you’ll wear when you go shooting. It’s much better to have a lightweight, comfortable pair of earmuffs you want to wear than a heavy set that you take off all the time.

To get more information about hearing damage and how to protect it visit the following links:

hiddenhearing.ie

Hearing protection on Wikipedia

The Best Shooting Hearing Protection

Now that you understand a bit more about how decibels work, here are some of the best specific products on the market right now:

Professional Safety Ear Muffs by Decibel Defense

These ear muffs reduce noise by about 34 decibels under average conditions. This is an incredibly high number, making them one of the absolute best pairs for indoor shooters.

They’re still great for outdoor shooting, too, but many people prefer lighter or lower profile ear muffs when they don’t need as much hearing protection.

One of the best things about these ear muffs is how comfortable they manage to be without sacrificing sound protection. Many competing models of ear muffs lack the robust padding and well-designed top band that makes this pair so great.

You won’t forget they’re on your head, but you’ll be able to wear these through long shooting sessions with no problems. The Decibel Defense is definitely one of our favorite non-electronic pair of ear muffs and you will certainly not be disappointed when wearing them.

 

Howard Leight Impact Sport Electric Earmuff

Designed specifically for shooting, these earmuffs provide 22 decibels of noise reduction. This is quite a bit less than you want for indoor shooting, but if you’re outside, it’s plenty to keep your ears protected.

The HL Impact Sport uses slim cups that don’t interfere with the use of a stock. They’ve got a built in microphone and speaker system that relays quiet sounds around you through the noise-dampening ear muffs.

This allows you to hold conversations while shooting outside and helps keep up your situational awareness.

As an extra convenience feature, you can plug in a phone or mp3 player and listen to music or podcasts through these earmuffs. They’ve got incredible battery life (350 hours off of 2 AAAs) so you don’t need to worry about using them around the house either.

We like the Impact Sport mainly for how low profile and thin the ear cups are while yet giving a solid 22db of hearing protection, but we personally like its counterpart the Howard Leight Impact Pro which is an electronic hearing protector and gives more db protection up to 30db.

 

Sound Blocker Ear Plugs

The manufacturer of these ear plugs claims that they reduce noise by 33 dB when used correctly. This is great if true. In practice, variations in the size of your ears and how you use these plugs might change this number a little bit.

While I’m not a big fan of using plugs like this as your only source of hearing protection, they’re great to have in your shooting bag. If you have an unexpected guest, they’ll ensure that your guest stays safe at the range.

They’re also excellent for wearing under other forms of hearing protection to set up two layers of defense.

These plugs don’t stick out from your ears like ear muffs do, so they’re more comfortable for some people. They’re priced so low that you owe them a try.

You can save the plugs and use them multiple times which is great, however, we do recommend that these not be used as your only source of hearing protection when shooting. Again, It would be better to use these in conjunction with a pair of over the head earmuffs for added hearing protection.

 

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