Earplugs vs. Earmuffs

I took my 3 year old son to the Monster Jam tonight. He's now a Grave Digger fan for life, I'm sure. Just like he's a Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch fan for life, the latter much to my dismay. I'll support it, though. There are worse people he could be a fan of, maybe.

Anyway, on to the point of my story. I took a pair of American Allsafe earplugs for me, and I bought a pair of our Milwaukee earmuffs for him. I expected the earmuffs to be easier to get him to wear, which was the main reason I got those. I figured that earplugs would be coming out faster than I could put them in. Those were accurate assumptions, too.

First off, let me say that the corded ear plugs are very, very nice when you're removing them often. They're easy enough to drop, but they never fell because of the cords. I appreciated that. Of course, the headphones were similar with not falling, but it was because they weren't dropped.

What really shocked me was the difference in sound. The earplugs were rated at 26 dB reduction, while the earmuffs were rated at 28 dB. That seemed like pretty similar ratings, so I expected there to be very little difference. At the end of the night, I took out my earplugs and tried on the earmuffs as they were moving Grave Digger off the track. I was amazed at how little sound actually made its way in when compared to the earplugs I had been using all night.

What I failed to take into account is that the earplugs are very similar in sound reduction regardless of frequency. Earmuffs, on the other hand, filter higher frequencies even better than their rated dB reduction. Starting at around 4,000 Hz, the reduction is over 40 dB. That's a huge difference when compared to 26.

With that in mind, I'll be using these earmuffs any time I have my air compressor running indoors and I'll skip the earplugs. They're much more comfortable to me as well, but that's just a little extra bonus.