Ceramic filtered earplugs?

[Chain Smoker]

Spied these on Amazon yesterday:

http://www.amazon.com/Nonoise-Shoot...id=1408310875&sr=8-3&keywords=ceramic+earplug

I had never heard of these before. Anyone know how well they work?

 

[Miked7762]

I've had a similar set for years but I no longer use them when shooting. At ranges I would sometimes leave with ringing in my ears unless I also wore earmuffs over them, which completely negates the benefit of using them. So I returned to normal foam earplugs with earmuffs over those as well.

Neither NIOSH nor OSHA will assign a NRR rating for these types of plugs so it's difficult to say exactly how effective they are. Most of the published 'independent' tests and foreign government agency tests do not show good results, especially with low frequency impulse noise. For hunting, when you otherwise might not wear any protection at all, I can see their value. But for normal shooting I won't further risk my hearing. Especially when electronic earmuffs are getting so inexpensive and work so much better for hearing things around you.

 

[hso]

First, you should always use plugs and muffs when shooting to provide the additional protection.

Secondly, you should understand that the vocal range for hearing is 100-10,000 Hz and that you can hear music from about 40-18,000 Hz.

What you're protecting is just the frequency range the hearing protection is attenuating and most hearing protection if focused on the range of the human voice, not the full range that you can hear.

For less than the price of those ear plugs you can purchase a box of 200 pair of Howard Leight foam plugs that provide MUCH better protection over a much wider frequency range than those ceramic plugs.

 

[rcmodel]

Or, you can stuff cigarette filters or empty cartridge brass in your ears for free, like we had to do 50 years ago in the Army.

That didn't work too well either.

But first.
WHAT DID YOU SAY??

rc