Taming the Vulfpeck

This ↑ is what happens when Joe Dart breaks the sound barrier playing “Dean Town”. (And not when i drop my phone on a 2,000-year-old theatre’s stone steps trying to put it in my pocket — my back pocket.) Vulfpeck’s concert at the Jazz à Vienne festival was the best non-jazz concert i’ve ever been to, but also one of the loudest. Which is to say: it was the perfect venue to test out new earplugs.

Believe it or not, foam plugs like the good old 3M E-A-R Classics are the gold standard, as they can provide a 30 to 50 dB noise reduction. But they only work if you insert them properly, and they destroy sound quality, cutting the highs to the point of making everything dull and lifeless. They’re a godsend when you need to work or sleep in a noisy environment, but when it comes to music, there are far better solutions — earplugs with acoustic filters.

Instead of packing your ear canal with foam to block as much noise as possible, they force sound to pass through a carefully tuned chamber before entering your ear canal. Membranes, meshes, vents or other elements work to bring the volume down without affecting the sonic characteristics too much. You lose less of the detail that makes music worth hearing, and what you’re left with sounds (almost) the same, simply quieter.

I’ve been using Etymotic ER20XS earplugs for a long time. Their 20 dB noise reduction might not seem impressive, but at the average amplified concert, it brings your safe exposure time from a few minutes to a few hours. Better yet, they attenuate all frequencies pretty evenly. Once they’re in your ears, it feels like you have a volume knob for the world. At noisy festivals, it allows you to reduce the ambient chatter down to a whisper, and focus on the main event.

That being said, the ER20XS aren’t without their faults. You want your earplugs to, well, plug your ears. Etymotic goes about it with belt and braces: the triple-flange tips bite deep for a tight seal, and their slightly tacky surface grips to stop them backing out. I was already used to deep tips, but i’ve never got on with the texture — it gets dirty fast, and worst of all, it makes my ears itchy after a few hours. It’s taken me almost a decade to do something about it, which is saying something, but this year, i’ve decided to audition the Alpine MusicSafe earplugs.

They come in a nifty metal case with two sets of filters: the gold-coloured ones provide a 22 dB attenuation, while the silver-coloured ones are rated for 19 dB. That level of noise reduction comes at the cost of sound quality — the filters clearly work on a downward slope, reducing the highs a bit more than the mids, and the mids a bit more than the lows. That’s the usual compromise with passive earplugs, and i can’t say it’s enough of a problem to justify the insane cost of active devices.

After a few concerts, i think Alpine’s earplugs will do just fine. Their filters are so small that it’s a bit hard to grab them, but their double flange tips are so comfortable that i forgot to remove them on more than one occasion. I’ll keep the Etymotic ER20XS for shorter or quieter concerts — they’re still the best cheap earplugs i’ve worn. But if i need to eke out a bit more protection for festivals, i’ll be sure to bring the Alpine MusicSafes, sound quality be damned. At least until i fall for professional custom-made earplugs with far more linear filters.