- Looking for hearing protection for hunting or shooting
but still want to be able to hear the person next to you
and the game off in the distance?
Well, in this video,
I'm talking about the Westone DefendEar
Digital hearing protection, coming up.
Hi guys, Cliff Olson, doctor of audiology
and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions
in Anthem, Arizona, and on this channel,
I cover a bunch of hearing-related information
to help make you a better informed consumer.
So if you're into that,
consider hitting the Subscribe button.
So part of my job is finding the best products
to recommend to my patients and to my viewers,
and recently I did a review
of the SoundGear Custom hearing protection
that I will link in the card up here
and in the description below, but in this video,
I wanted to talk about the Westone Digital DefendEar.
Westone's DefendEar Digital line of hearing protection
comes in three different models.
DefendEar Digital 1 is designed to give you
overall suppression of gunfire
but still allowing you to hear and even amplify speech
that's around you.
The DefendEar 2 has two different modes.
The first one is for hunting
for basic intermittent gunshot protection
but still being able to hear either
someone who's next to you hunting with you
or the game off in the distance.
You can even amplify that sound if you want to.
And then the second mode is called the clay mode,
and this is for if you have a lot of gunfire
in rapid succession.
It's designed to keep all of that gunfire suppressed
but when there's no gunfire,
again you're able to hear those sounds around you.
The third one is DefendEar Hunter,
and this is of course designed for hunters as well.
The first mode is exactly the same as Digital 2,
where it suppresses intermittent gunfire
but it still amplifies sounds around you
so you can still hear well.
The second mode on this one is designed
to reduce wind noise.
So if you've ever been hunting,
and there's ever been a breeze or a wind,
that wind will hit the microphones on the DefendEar devices,
and if you don't want to hear that rustling sound as much,
you can switch it into the second program,
where it will still suppress a gunshot
but it also lowers things down a little bit
so that wind noise doesn't bother you as much.
All right, let's first take a look at the pros
of the DefendEar line of products.
First and foremost, DefendEar is made by Westone.
Westone is an absolutely terrific ear mold manufacturer.
We use them for hearing aids.
We use them for regular hunting protection
that does not have digital noise suppression.
So all around, they just really know what they're doing
when it comes to making ear molds.
And so when recommending a certain type
of hunter's protection, it's really nice to have a company
that can make you a terrific product.
The second thing that I really like
about the DefendEar product is that
it is made with their OtoBlast silicone,
which is much better of a sound suppressor
than an acrylic device.
It fills up your ear nicely.
If you have a little bit of movement,
if you're moving your jaw or talking,
it still provides you with protection
because it kind of molds to your ear a little bit better.
It's also really nice because if that silicone material
ends up wearing out or ripping or something like that,
which can happen,
you don't have to buy an entirely new device.
You can actually just get another silicone portion
made for you because the digital suppressor
is completely separate.
Now the silicone comes with a one-year warranty,
and within the first 90 days of that,
you can get it remade as many times as you need to
to make sure that it fits your ear perfectly.
Now the digital sound suppressor portion,
which is this black piece that you see right there,
that portion right there has a two-year warranty
against any kind of defects that it may have.
And they basically just fit together like this.
Now the third thing that I like about
the DefendEar line of hearing protection
is that they actually have an NRR of 26,
which is a noise reduction rating of 26.
Now you can get larger NRR numbers
with things like foam hearing protectors,
but that's assuming you're putting the hearing protector
all the way inside your ear canal to get that full value,
and so you're not really sure whether or not
you're getting the full amount of the NRR
when you're using a non-custom product.
When you use a custom product like this,
you know you're getting it into the right spot
every single time, which means you're gonna be getting
that full amount of NRR value.
But the other thing that I really like about these products
is that they actually publish their IPIL rating.
Basically, this is a rating that identifies
the impulsive peak insertion loss.
There are ANSI guidelines,
or American National Standard Institute guidelines
on the IPIL rating, which is designed to identify
just how well a protector attenuates or reduces
an impulse noise like a gunshot.
As you can see in the graph here,
it shows the amount of attenuation given
at a specific peak exposure level in decibels in SPL,
which is sound pressure level.
Then you can see the amount of reduction
given by the digital series of DefendEar protectors
versus the non-digital or passive DefendEar protectors.
Basically, you get way more protection
with the digital protectors.
Now considering you can drop 168-decibel gunshot
by 42 decibels, it shows that these things work
amazingly and it's one of the biggest reasons
why I love their product.
All right, that's it about the pros
but we have to talk about the cons of this product
a little bit, and the first con is that you really need
a custom ear mold in order to send off to Westone.
Generally you can go to pretty much
any hearing care professional
in order to get ear mold impressions
and get them done for a reasonable rate,
but you just want to make sure that you're going to someone
who really knows what they're doing
because the quality of the ear mold impression
will directly impact how well that hearing protector
works for you.
Finding a hearing care professional near you
is relatively easy.
All you have to do is go to hearingtracker.com
and enter the state and city that you live in
and hopefully there'll be a provider
that's close to where you live.
The second con to digital hearing protection in general
is that they are going to be more expensive
than passive hearing protection.
I mean, you can pretty much get a pair
of those foam hearing protectors for under a buck,
and the Digital DefendEar line of devices
will cost you anywhere from $1,300 for a pair
up to $1,900 for a pair, and that middle price
is around $1,500, depending on where you go.
But I would consider literally anything
that costs $1,000 or more to be expensive
whether we're talking about hearing protection
or anything else, but when you consider the amount of money
that you would spend on a hearing loss
that would be sustained from potentially only one gunshot,
it makes sense to spend the money to protect your hearing
if you shoot a lot.
Now I've been online and I've actually seen
digital hearing protectors that have cost up to $3,500
for a pair.
When you really look at these devices,
they perform extremely well,
and the thing that I really like
is that they have good, solid data.
In fact, you could even look at that white paper,
I will link it in the description below,
that explains why these products work so well
and how much noise reduction that they give you.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions,
leave them in the comment section below.
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hit that Subscribe button.
I'll see you next time.