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Muffs or Ear Plugs - the health of hearing!


Towngun
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An interesting debate is the need to use ear muffs rather than plugs - sound vibrates via bone surrounding the ear and there is a need to protect this entire areas.

 

Audiologist or licensed hearing aid specialist determine what kind of hearing loss is present, by a bone conduction hearing test administered by a vibrating tuning fork is placed behind the ear allowing sound to conduct via bone.

 

It is astonishing that may game shots still do not use any form of ear protection!

 

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I thought it was well known that sound is transmitted through your bones and that all things being equal muffs are better than plugs. However I guess a lot of it comes down to how much shooting you are doing if are deciding between muffs and plugs. Personally I shoot about 100-150 carts a week and have decided to use plugs in summer and muffs in winter.

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An interesting debate is the need to use ear muffs rather than plugs - sound vibrates via bone surrounding the ear and there is a need to protect this entire areas.

 

Audiologist or licensed hearing aid specialist determine what kind of hearing loss is present, by a bone conduction hearing test administered by a vibrating tuning fork is placed behind the ear allowing sound to conduct via bone.

 

It is astonishing that may game shots still do not use any form of ear protection!

 

i know what you mean about the game shots !! i might shoot 1 or 2 shots with no hearing protection if i need to but they shoot 100+ shots with no hearing protection

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I have to admit being very lax in this department. I've some active ear muffs that I use for clay shooting but with field shooting as I very often fire only a few (30 ish) shots I don't often use anything. I need to get off my backside and get something sorted that I'm going to use, hopefully I'm not too late as I can suffer from wax build up which I attribute to shooting without any protection. It won't be long before there is some permenant damage.

 

Ear protection is a few boxes of cartridges (quite a few for higher spec ones!). I need to bite the bullet so to say..

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Up till now I have only bothered uasing ear protection when clay shooting, and that has been the "Peltor" ear muff type. These give pretty good protection but do make it extremely hard to hear someong talking to you or calling "Pull"! I also find that my Peltor ear muffs are a little tight on my ears, which is great for sound protection, but can if worn for long periods (i.e. If I am shooting a 50 bird DTL shoot) give me a bit of a head ache.

For this reason I have decided to buy and try a cheapish pair of ear plugs/protectors to see how I get on with them.

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What about cotton wool? Where does that fit in? On a serious note a few oldies who used to shoot thought that this was the only real way

I use cotton wool and then muffs on top but I guess I am a real oldie.

Seriously everyone look after your hearing, even with the above protection I shot 2000 cheap shells which were really loud and this brought tinnitus (ringing in the ears) on which is now permanent and very difficult to live with.

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Everyone is different and some seem to have more sensitive ears/hearing than others. My father suffered significant hearing loss from a single event, firing Bren Guns inside corrugated iron shelters during his National Service (for which he now receives a small pension). I too seem to have inherited the weakness now suffering ~30% hearing loss combined with severe tinnitus). Equally, all through my teens and early twenties, I exposed the ears to excessive noise on an all too frequent basis (walking around the fields with shotgun, firing blanks in the army cadets, live firing with the military, motorcycling with Walkman on, clubbing). I now wear both custom made inserts and Peltor Pro Tac Cans and yet even only having been shooting again for 12-months or so (after a 10-15 year break), the hearing/tinnitus has still got noticeably worse. A good friend has a very similar background, yet has not suffered any hearing loss or tinnitus and even now shoots .22 without any form of hearing protection (although he does put his cans on when I take the .243 out). If I had my time again, I would certainly look after the hearing a lot better and at the very least, invest in and always use a quality set of electronic cans no matter how little or much shooting I did.

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