| badhearing 2005-07-20, 1:52 pm |
| djk wrote:
> In article <dblnqd0gq@news1.newsguy.com>, badhearing@me.com
> says...
>
>...
> this is simply not the case in any ear protection that I have
> seen for sale in the United States. OSHA regulates the
> manufacture specs of most (if not all) ear protection sold in
> the United States and the specs specifically state that the
> upper frequencies are dampened the most, lowest frequencies
> next, and the middle (*speech*) the least.
Look at this:
http://www.hear-more.com/musician.htm
<<<
Problem 1:
Regardless of their construction, solid earplugs produce 10 to 20
dB of high frequency attenuation. The result is that people often reject
them because they can't hear speech clearly.[vbcol=seagreen]
Very true in my experience (I tried silicone ear plugs mostly).
BTW: have you tried yourself?
In that page there is also a frequency response graph for the normal ear
plugs and the musician ones they promote. You can see that at 4-8KHz
(probably the most important zone for speech recognition) the dampening
is 10 db more than for lowest frequencies. Maybe frequencies > 8 KHz are
dampened even more, but the lowest frequencies already impair the speech
recognition too much.
I also have a pair of the musician ear plugs they promote, I think it's
the middle one "ER-20": with those ear plugs the CAPD problem stays the
same as without plugs (and they are horrible to look at, so I don't wear
them)
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