My first job out of high school was at a machine shop, it was so loud that we had yearly mandated hearing tests, They would march us out to the parking lot to the specially outfitted step van and administer the hearing tests on site. As a side note, this was by the airport, and in the flight path of the jumbo jets… don’t know how effective those hearing tests were.
So my hearing has been shot from the get go. I have tinnitus all the time, and I cant ride my bike over 40 mph without proper fitting earplugs. I’ve become obsessed with earplugs, I bought a bulk pack of them from my local hardware store and have them stashed everywhere.
I’ve been searching for good noise isolating headphones, but have yet to find something that is cheap enough that I can afford it, and fits me well enough to be used at highway speeds.
I am a fan of Howard Leight Max-1 foam plugs, very cheap in a box of 200 from Amazon. Hearo’s are too small to properly block noise for me. If you use plugs, learn to insert them correctly (pulling ear back, rolling them down to insert them deeper) because it makes a huge difference in how effective they are.
I used to ride with custom silicone plugs. They are way faster to insert. The frequencies they block are different than foam plugs and on a bike with no wind screen I could hear traffic noises around me BETTER with those plugs in than without plugs. I wanted more total noise reduction so I switched to foamies for longer rides.
I tried a few IEM earphones but none of them block wind noise as well. I ended up preferring helmet speakers outside my plugs (used AutoCom for many years, switched to Sena 20S when it was introduced). Properly aligned AutoCom speakers sounded through earplugs just fine but the Sena is slightly too quiet at max volume for this.
Check out the bulk packaged earplugs mentioned above. The Amazon link has three sizes (medium is the one linked). The user comments/reviews give a set of links to the larger ones.
Each pair comes in a little disposable plastic bag, and the 200 bags are in a useful cardboard dispenser box.
I too insist on using them whenever I ride, which is quite often. I ride about 10 months out of the year, which is tough in the Philadelphia region. So much more interesting on a GSX-R than an old Chevy Lumina.
I typically get over a dozen uses out of a pair so a case has lasted me years. I also take a few spare ones in my tank bag and hand them to any other riders I happen to come across when they say they’ve never tried them.
I also find that I prefer the blocking of the foam ones to the partial block of silicone ones. Silicone ones leave a little too much noise in and I still get a little sensory overloading.
I use them just for emergency vehicles. An ambulence siren can get painful when it gets close. You can still hear everything you need to, as let’s face it, you can’t hear a car’s engine over your own until they’re too close to matter.
Been riding for over 20 years, and never used earplugs. On a side note, earplugs of any kind are forbidden where I ride. I also enjoy music, so I opted to “install” speakers into my helmet. Been doing that for 4 years now, no issues.
I do only ride >35mph, so there’s that…
The speed is a major issue; as mentioned, it’s prolonged exposure to high-frequency wind noise that causes the damage, not the mechanical noise of the bike.
My hearing is absolutely shite these days; a youthful fondness for very loud music, a history of working with large machinery and twenty years on bikes all combined for that.
But most of the damage was done on a single bike trip. Four weeks at 130km/h across the desert without earplugs; completely trashed my ability to distinguish high-frequency sound.
