Want to still attend your favourite music concerts, outdoor festivals, and other loud environments but worried about your hearing? Sennheiser has a solution with the SoundProtex hearing protection earplugs, which are designed to allow you to still enjoy loud environments that could be harmful to your hearing (especially for longer, repeated exposure) while protecting your precious hearing. The Plus version, meanwhile, allows you to adjust the amount of sound filtering.
Many music fans resort to standard earplugs, but these can make the band or singer sound as though they are underwater. Sennheiser used its extensive experience in sound to develop the SoundProtex, which allow the music or other sounds to be heard in a more natural fashion, but at a much lower volume.
The advanced high-fidelity ear plugs have patented membrane filter technology. This allows for hearing balanced, full frequency sound without damaging hearing. It preserves sonic details but reduces the sound pressure that reaches your ear. The filter then lowers potentially harmful volume levels so that you can listen safely for longer. The decibel level at many rock concerts, for example, is above 100dB, and exposure to such decibel levels for more than 15 minutes puts the listener at risk of hearing damage.
The two-stage filters in SoundProtex are capable of passing on only clear, balanced sound to a user’s ears. The combination of a tuned membrane and a sound dampening mesh reduces high and low frequencies in equal measure. To understand speech, people rely heavily on higher frequency details. But standard earplugs can mask those details. The balanced SoundProtex filters keep enough of the higher frequencies to preserve ambient awareness so you can also still have a normal conversation at a concert.
Naturally, the Sennheiser SoundProtex earplugs are not throwaway, single use ones. Simply wipe them down after use, or rinse them under water. Each pair comes with three sizes of eartips along with a small carry pouch. The soft, flexible, medical-grade TPE material is free of plasticizers and other substances that could irritate the sensitive skin in ears.
In addition to during concerts, festivals, and other loud environments, you could also easily enjoy wearing the Sennheiser SoundProtex earplugs for peace and quiet in a noisy office, while traveling, working with heavy machinery, and in other situations when you want to block out loud noise. You could also wear them to sleep. They are air and water-tight, so they will also protect your ears from water while swimming.
The Sennheiser SoundProtex Plus is an upgraded version that’s identical in terms of features and what’s in the box, except it adds two additional acoustic filters so you can choose among three different levels of sound attenuation. You might need more filtering, for example, at a rocking concert than you would at the office.
The strongest filter offers an estimated single number rating (SNR) of 20 dB for loud music, motorsports, or power tool use. Medium is perfect for festivals, events, or travelling, with an estimated SNR of 17 dB. The low filter is suitable for quieter or non-amplified concerts, noisy offices, or visiting bars and restaurants and has an estimated SNR of 10 dB. When you want complete silence, pop in the total block filter.
The Sennheiser SoundProtex and SoundProtex Plus will be available for pre-order on May 16, 2023, and will go on sale on May 30, with an MSRP of 39.90 and 79.90 Euros, respectively. There’s no word yet on North American availability.