With the leaves changing colors and the weather cooling off, hunting season is starting! And we at EPSS want to make sure you're well-armed -- with hearing protection knowledge!
Most people do not realize that the further away you are from someone speaking, the more difficult it is to understand what is being said, even if the volume is turned up.
The problem is even more acute for a person with high frequency hearing loss, which is all too common. (If you’re over 40 and don’t have at least some trouble understanding conversation in a noisy restaurant, you’re in the lucky minority!) That phenomenon is due to two facts: (1) the higher-frequency hearing range (from 2500Hz to 8000Hz) is very important to our ability to comprehend human speech, and (2) most hearing loss occurs in that critical high-frequency range.
That leaves many of us shouting to be heard. However, when we project our voice, the extra volume we produce comes from the lower frequencies (which we generally do not lose from noise-induced hearing damage), but the comprehension still comes from the higher-frequency part of speech (which is the first to go when sitting next to the speakers at a rock concert or spending a lot of time at the shooting range). So speaking up may not be helping as much as you might think.
(Coincidentally, this is also why it is easier for us to understand a male with a deeper voice than it is for us to understand a female with a higher-pitched voice. We can now explain to our wives that we are not intentionally listening only to our hunting buddies and ignoring her when she is trying to talk over dinner!)
So if we want to hang on to our ability to hear speech clearly, we clearly need to wear hearing protection, and protect that high-frequency hearing! But what about being able to hear speech while we’re so responsibly wearing our earmuffs…?
Most passive hearing protection (like your favorite pair of foam earplugs or non-electronic earmuffs) is better at blocking out sound on the mid-to-high end of the frequency spectrum. So, anyone wearing hearing protection will find it more difficult to understand what is being said around them -- but not just because the volume is lower (the reason we wear earmuffs in the first place!), but also because most noise attenuation blocks out the high-frequency sound that provides us with speech comprehension. This explains why, even if you can hear a friend talking to you from the next shooting lane, it’s still so difficult to understand what he is saying with your passive earmuffs on: without the high-frequency sound, your buddy’s voice just sounds garbled. To make matters worse, the further you are away from the person speaking, the more difficult it is to understand. This happens because low frequency sounds travel better through air than the high frequency sounds needed for speech comprehension.
So in short, passive hearing protection can protect your capacity for speech comprehension... but while you’re actually wearing that hearing protection, your ability to comprehend speech typically plummets. So what to do?
If you want to improve your ability to understand what is being said in a noisy environment, you need to be able to amplify low decibel (quiet), high frequency (high-pitched) sounds. There are a number of Electronic Earmuffs available to help amplify those low decibel speech sounds while still protecting your hearing from dangerous loud sounds (anything above 85 dB). The amplification these products use mostly works along the same principle as a hearing aid. The better products like the Pro Ears Gold Series even include various filters to enhance certain frequencies, boosting the quality of the sound enough to actually improve your comprehension of speech.
Generally, Electronic Hearing Protectors will employ “peak clipping” technology, which shuts off the amplification system whenever there is a sound above a certain decibel level. While this technology effectively protects your ears from damaging sound, it also means that while the amplification system is shut off, you can no longer understand what is being said. This creates a scenario where safe, low decibel sounds (like speech) are always interrupted by loud, high decibel sounds (like gunshots) – essentially creating a very choppy listening experience, like a cell phone that keeps cutting out.
If you want to be able to continuously hear those low decibel conversations (think: safety) then you need a hearing protector that employs “compression technology” to provide continuous amplification of low decibel sounds while not amplifying the high decibel sounds (those are being compressed). Pro Ears Earmuffs all rely on Compression Technology. Make it a healthy habit to wear this type of high-quality hearing protector whenever you may be exposed to dangerously loud noises, and you may very well discover you can hear speech a lot more clearly – both with and without your hearing protection on.
The author is Gary Lemanski, hunting/shooting hearing protection expert and co-owner of Altus Brands, LLC., manufacturer of the Pro-Ears line of electronic shooting earmuffs, hunters hearing aids, and other hunting related products. http://www.altusbrands.com/
Stay tuned for more hunting season hearing protection facts, information, and suggestions, and how-to's!
And until next time, be safe and do the right thing.
--Tom "Dr. Earplug" Bergman
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