Oh what a difference there is in hearing protection.

There’s no question I’ve lost some of my hearing — just ask my wife. 😉  The main culprit in my life is loud music, but motorcycles and guns haven’t helped. On the guns front, I just got a major upgrade in preserving what hearing I have left.

I used to just have thick passive ear muffs. Offered like 33-34 NRR, worked nicely, but of course, you can’t hear very well — which is the point, but did make things difficult when in classes or teaching and you need to hear and give range commands.

So I bought a pair of Pro Ears Predator Gold. Why these? Because Pro Ears are top of the line. But I got the “slim cup” model because if I was going to spend that much, I wanted something I could use with any firearm. At the time, I was doing more long-gun shooting, so this made sense. Since then tho, I’ve found that I pretty much stick with handguns. But more so, a vast majority of time I’m around guns it’s during a class when there could be up to a dozen handguns going off at the same time, rapidly, many rounds, and yeah, that gets loud.

So something like the Predators, with only about 26 NRR, are OK, but not the most protection you can get.

What made it worse? After all the sun, sweat, sunscreen, etc. the cup pads were getting hard. With the pads getting hard, that meant they didn’t hold to my head as snuggly as fresh pads would. Furthermore, with both my seeing glasses and then shooting protection glasses, the arms of the glasses go under the muff cup pads, which breaks that seal even more. I had noticed over the past year that I didn’t always like being in classes, too close to the line. I’d be flinching and finding that there was just too much noise coming in.

I finally got off my duff and ordered a new set of ears: the Pro Ears Pro Tac Mag Gold. They say they have 30 NRR, but I’ve seen this model also listed at 33 and 34, so who knows… maybe minor design changes over the years? I finally got to wear them in classes a few weeks ago, and gee if I wasn’t happier!

The cup pads were soft, and conformed quite well to my head.

The band was pretty tight, and really held the cups in place and pressed things firmly against my head. Not too firm that it hurt, but firm enough to ensure a good seal. This along with the fresh pads helped mitigate the glasses issues.

The extra NRR? Well, I’ll just say I barely noticed the gunfire, in terms of it “hurting” my hearing. Awesome!

I got this particular model because they can accept CR123A batteries. That’s nice for me since I have enough things using that style of battery, I don’t have to have a special load of “N” size batteries just for my hearing protection. They do warn this takes up a little more cup space, but it was not a problem for me. In fact, I always felt the cups were too shallow in the Predators for me, which may have helped cause some of my problems because 1. it meant less snuggness against the face, 2. if there was physical contact, it could be transmitting the sound waves right down to my eardrum anyways.

Now, the Tac model inverts the cups to help with cheek weld. Well, maybe YOU can do it, but I tried and it was just a fail. So I flipped my cups over (easy to snap off and on). Sure the logo is upside down, but who cares.

So folks, a few lessons:

1. Get the best hearing protection you can. You spent all that money on a great gun to help protect your life. But to have your life and lose your hearing wouldn’t be so hot. So, protect it and don’t skimp. I’ll still keep my Predators around for long-gun use, but using them will be exception and not the rule.

2. Keep the hearing protection in good shape. Replace the pads, keep fresh batteries around, give it a wipe-down before you shove it back in your range bag, and so on. Take care of your investment.