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0 pointsgenewitch4y ago0 comments

I can't use noise cancelling headphones, at least on-ear and over-ear. I've never liked earbuds/IEM, so I never test them.

However, active earmuffs are amazing. I had my favorite pair finally give out, they had FM radio and an aux jack, but we're not active. It was fun to run a chipper and listen to a podcast, for instance.

For things I want hearing protection I have 4 choices now. The industry standard earplugs, which are foam that you roll and insert - Howard Leight, passive cans style muffs - generic, generic aviator style muffs with active microphones, and a fancy pair of Howard Leight active muffs.

The active ones are amazing. I can't believe I waited so long.

I live someplace so quiet now that I have to run fans or I can't sleep. The silence feels like a huge weight. When there's a widespread power outage I barely get any sleep, for example. I don't know that I could ever live near a thoroughfare ever again, for any amount of money.

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tomerbd4y ago

What is "active earmuffs"?

mdp20214y ago

Active noise cancelling is placing between ears and source an inverted wave generator.

A soundwave is coming, you intake it with a microphone and attempt producing its inversion in real time in speakers, to cancel it.

As I have written, it may not work properly with impactive noise - it can do the opposite, because the impactive sound is cleaner. Or, it may be calibrated for impactive noise - so there exist earmuffs that recognize shooting sounds at their inception, to reduce these selectively.

genewitchOP4y ago

They're like shooting muffs/cans, except they have a microphone on each side, batteries, and an amplifier. when it's off, they're regular hearing protection. When you turn them on, you can adjust the volume from "slightly lower than without the muffs on", to "actual volume", to "hear a cricket fart across the street". When a loud sound is detected - say, clapping, gunfire, hitting an anvil - it shuts off the amplifier.

As an aside, since your ears are not ringing / recovering from a very loud sound, and the amplifier turns back on very quickly, you can hear the reverberations, echos, and sympathetic resonances. It's quite cool.

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