Musicians Earplugs (MEPs) are custom-fitted passive hearing protection devices that are intended to maintain the relative loudness of sound across frequencies, while providing a modest amount of attenuation. To achieve the intended performance, the earplug must be sufficiently long (past the ear canal's 2nd bend) and the earplug's hollow sound bore must have acoustic mass that falls within manufacturer specifications. Herein, we report the performance of MEPs made from Lantos ear scans and digitally manufactured to correct, as well as incorrect, acoustic specifications for a cohort of ears. Data show that the uniformity of attenuation and occlusion effect magnitude were heavily influenced by the length of the earplug in the ear canal. The acoustic mass of the sound bore of the earplug did not significantly influence the occlusion effect magnitude, and had modest effect on the uniformity of attenuation across 125 – 8000 Hz.

Authors: Fligor, Brian J.; Grenier, John
Affiliations: Lantos Technologies, Inc., Woburn, MA, USA; GSO College of Audiology, Salus University, Elking Park, PA, USA(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Conference: 2018 AES International Conference on Music Induced Hearing Disorders (June 2018)
Paper Number: P-11
Publication Date: June 11, 2018
Session Subject: 3D Ear Scanning; Musicians Earplugs; Digital Manufacturing

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.