I resorted to wearing earplugs for several years when I was going out more. I felt it did very little to reduce my ability to hear conversations, and it made the whole experience overall so much more pleasant.
Lowering the volume can help with the SNR, because neither the signal, the noise, nor the lowering effect caused by earplugs are consistent with respect to frequency. Highly objectionable, harsh 4-8 kHz noise that might echo around a concrete and steel venue is blocked well by good earplugs, while low-frequency 100-400 Hz speech is ineffectively blocked.
I wonder if anyone has made a set of earplugs that specifically target attenuation so that primary speech frequencies are less affected. I know foamies roll off HF aggressively (looks like 2k is the knee point[1])
My issue with foam earplugs is that they're too good at attenuating. I end up wearing them partially inserted, which is ok as long as you're staying still. If you are at a concert, or you're eating, or you have long hair, you'll disturb them.
I like Etymotic (https://www.etymotic.com). The design lowers the decibels without affecting the sound too much. I used to play in a band with a drummer who always wore their high-end plugs which you have to have molded to your ear canals, but they also make cheaper standardized ones that do a good job.
The cheap etymotic plugs are great value. I always have a pair on my keyring. The advantage over foam plugs is that the attenuation is more linear so you don’t feel so weird wearing them.
Loops are great as a sibling comment mentioned but I had to have very loud dehumidifiers in my house all weekend; I've been walking around with my Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 3s in transparency mode (i.e. uses microphones to play sound from the outside into the headphone), and it's been amazing. It cut the audio to a maximum level and let me discern conversations more easily than folks not wearing anything.
They're super comfortable and they don't look weird like the neon yellow foam ones :) Before I always disliked wearing earplugs when I have to at concerts, but the ones from Loop I just wear anywhere I like that is too loud
Those are great for the workshop, but they're flourescent green and pink. That makes it easy to see when someone's wearing them, which is good in a shop but usually bad in social settings.
On the cheap, Earasers. They're small enough that they're almost invisible, and they're designed to attenuate roughly evenly across the audible spectrum. That makes them great for concerts, but other folks here claim that the top-heavy attentuation profile of non-music specific earplugs is actually better for speech.
Ha. Classic techie parachuting in and incorrectly intuiting how something works. Show me earplugs that REDUCE equally across all frequencies and I’ll invest every dollar I have to my name.
> Show me earplugs that REDUCE equally across all frequencies and I’ll invest every dollar I have to my name.
It has been a long time since I worked tangentially with frequencies, but IIRC it physically isn't possible to block/dampen all frequencies of sound. Although due to different physical phenomena, this is why everything has a color and nothing is truly black - it is impossible for a material to suck in every wavelength of light.
Here's a publication featuring ear protection products for musicians that attempts to do this. It's not perfect but it's pretty good (I own a set of custom earmolds with the Etymotic filters).
That's not entirely true, if you're selectively lowering the volume of different frequencies it might solve the problem. The only problem with that is that earplugs tend to reduce high frequencies more than low frequencies, but background noise is mostly low frequencies. Earplugs might help you hear people in a machine shop with a lot of high frequency noises though.
For decades now, when I enter a bar or restaurant I turn down the volume of my hearing aid. Not because everything is too loud, but because it allows me to hear spoken speech much better. It doesn't work quite as well on modern digital hearing aids as it did on older analog, and I don't fully understand the mechanics of it, but it's what I do.
Except it absolutely will help you discern speech. The sound blocking is not uniform across all frequencies and most speech is not blocked very well. So earplugs will make speech 20% quieter but will also make all the nonsense going on around you 70% quieter. So the speech will be easier to hear assuming you don't have $3 Wish earplugs.
