Headphones

[goo]

Any recommends for good in-helmet earphones that you can actually hear properly at speed? My Shure ones (which incorporate earplugs) are worn-out and they never worked that well - they poke out at get pulled out of place by the helmet. Or maybe it's about a quiet helmet or windshield??

[Lonerider]

I would not use in ear plugs for listening to music/satnav. (Personnel preference) I used to use the the big old walkman type ear phones which you can buy and they fit in side the helmet with with velcro. Most helmets have and indentation around the area of the ear so you can fit them in to place. Some helmets even have a small piece of removable padding near the ear so you can fit them more snugly. You can also work the wiring behind the remainder of the padding so that its all tucked away. I am not suggesting you buy one but my old BMW helmet was great for that. There are other helmets on the market which you can do the same with. The more quieter helmets are IMO the best for this.

Wayne

[Threewheelbonnie]

Get yourself a kit off evilbay that let's you mould your own earplugs. Take your earbuds of choice put them in your ears and mould the epoxy foam stuff round them. Wait ten minutes, you can listen to music, then pop them out. If the earbuds drops out, superglue it back into the cavity in the earplug.

Can't post a link from here, but if you Google threewheelguzzi and click on the comms tab there a bit more info and link to pictures.

Three quid bargain store earbuds boosted via a Scala Bluetooth works for me. Open face helmet so the pad type are useless unless you want to crank up the volume to 13 and only hear rock music drumming. Seal the ear and you can separate the music from the back ground. I don't get on with quiet helmets as they always seem to restrict vision, so always wear earplugs anyway.

Andy

[backofbeyond]

Andy, just a quick question about earplugs. I'm a regular user of the disposable foam ones and find that if I roll them up tight enough and manage to get them properly into my ear canal they're very effective after they've expanded for a minute or two. However it's very easy (or hard) to get them just superficially pushed into the outer bit of the ear where they're nothing like as effective. Rolling them when they're warm means they expand before you can get them located and getting them into the inner ear becomes a trial of perseverance.

Presumably if you've moulded them with speakers in the mix we're not talking about something you roll up to use. Do they just sit in the outer ear area and if so how effective are they compared with properly inserted foam ones. I've seen (read) mixed reviews of kits for mould your own earplugs on e.g. Amazon and wondered if the bad reviews are from fumble fingered DIYers, disgruntled professional suppliers or whether the plugs are just not that good.

[Threewheelbonnie]

Wish I could post a link but phone bound just now.

The stuff is like plastercine that sets to rubber. Shove it in well enough and you get a mould that goes as far as something flat inside your ear which I've thought might be my ear drum. It about an inch down the hole. The speakers stop you getting this far so sort of seal on the funnely bit and their own expanding caps.

As plain earplugs without speakers these moulded type make me totally deaf, can't hear the wife at 2 feet away. ( not that i would ever get away with that for long ).


Does volume setting show effectiveness? With ear buds only I set my phone volume to 13 on the bike, 8 round the house. Helmet mounted speakers I can't hear set to 13 at 50 mph. Moulded in plugs I set my phone to 9 and can hear at 70 mph. I listen to classical music so the quiet bits are quiet and the loud bits loud. I am a little deaf from riding and music before we knew to protect ourselves.

Andy

[backofbeyond]

Hmm - not hearing my wife from 2 feet away is kind of what this is all about she'll be about 2 feet behind me across the US in a couple of months.

We've been looking at intercom headsets but (to bring it sort of back to what Goo's original post was about) going deaf from roll ups in your ears and then trying to hear anything from headset speakers by boosting the volume seems like an arms race worthy of the cold war.

When you get a chance, if you've got a link that would be rally helpful

[Lonerider]

Originally Posted by backofbeyond

Hmm - not hearing my wife from 2 feet away is kind of what this is all about she'll be about 2 feet behind me across the US in a couple of months.

We've been looking at intercom headsets but (to bring it sort of back to what Goo's original post was about) going deaf from roll ups in your ears and then trying to hear anything from headset speakers by boosting the volume seems like an arms race worthy of the cold war.

When you get a chance, if you've got a link that would be rally helpful

I could not fault the intercom had set I had in my BMW helmet when listening to music/sat nav and I didn't have to have the volume up that high. But I suppose wearing a good helmet and sat behind a good screen helped a lot as it keeps a lot of noise out

Wayne

[Threewheelbonnie]

Descripion

https://sites.google.com/site/threew.../comms-and-gps

Picture

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/phot...eat=directlink


Enjoy

Andy

[backofbeyond]

Thanks Andy. OK, nothing ventured, nothing gained; the investment is made and I'll see how I get on with the mould it yourself putty. I'll report back when I've tried it out.

[backofbeyond]

When I looked at what was available for DIY moulding ear plugs I had no way of distinguishing between the various offerings on Ebay (and Googling didn't help) so, in a justification of the marketeer's art, I went for the most eye-catching advert.

Here's what turned up a few days later -



Just out of shot is small velvety bag to keep the finished plugs in. At least I assume that's what it's for as it isn't mentioned in the instructions. A nice touch anyway and when you're only charging £12 with a few profit margins to be taken out along the way every penny must count.

The instructions were easy enough - take out a quarter of the material from each pot, mix the two bits together to a uniform (pinkish) colour and push / prod / mould it into your ear. You have two minutes to do this before it sets. Not knowing what to expect I had a medical professional assisting with this but her assistance only amounted to scribing an X into one of them so I could tell left from right.

It says in the instructions that you'll get a better fit if you can hold your mouth open slightly (1-2") during the 10 mins curing time and it suggests finding something of suitable thickness to bite on, battlefield surgery style. I found a plastic electronics box and spent the cure time dribbling over my shirt. Those 10 mins seemed like an eternity.

This is what emerged from my ears -



It was at this point I was glad I had the medical professional to hand as they really looked like something a biologist might be interested in. Quite what ontology was recapitulating we're still trying to work out.

So, how well did they work? Well they block my ears up but not quite as well as properly fitted expanding foam plugs. Whether that's intrinsic to the design / materials or whether I cocked up the 2 min rush to get the stuff into my ears I'm not sure but they do provide enough gloop in each pot for a second go so I'll try again at some point and compare. They are however a lot easier to fit than expanding foam plugs which is a huge plus.

Out on the bike (and again compared to the foam ones) I got slightly more wind noise and slightly less engine noise so there's some frequency selection difference between the materials. On balance it makes for a more relaxing ride if I can't hear the rattles so that's another plus. I haven't yet tried to mould earpieces into the material so that may be the next stage.

How long they last, whether I lose them or whether my opinion changes over a longer ride (only 10 -12 miles so far) I'll find out when I try them on a ride to the south of France in 10 days time.

[Threewheelbonnie]

Nice write up.

You really need to cram the goo in your ear. It helps if you elongagate the ball a bit before shoving. My second attempt produced something with a longer "stem" into my earhole and a bit of a mushroom head on the end. The stuff stays soft for a bit longer than two minutes but don't mess about. Next time I think I might buy two kits and only make three sets of plugs so there is no shortage of putty.

Apologies for the non-medical terms. I know there's an anvil and hammer in there somewhere which explains the ringing noises, but drums and stirrups and goodness knows what else is beyond me.

Andy

[backofbeyond]

After a few weeks, a couple of thousand miles, a hearing test and a chat with an ENT consultant I thought I'd update my findings. ENT, for anyone outside the UK or who doesn't recognise the shorthand, stands for ear, nose and throat and a consultant is a high end grade of hospital medic in the UK health service. In my case I was using the ear part of his skill set.

I started off using the DIY moulded earplugs as my plug of choice. After the previous report I had a week or so of local running around on the bike using a variety of helmets before heading off to the south of France on my 125. Over the course of that week a couple of things were noticeable. Firstly the moulded plugs were so much easier to put in / take out than foam disposables. They go in with a kind of rotatory motion almost as though you're screwing them into your ear. With a little practice this just takes a few seconds each. With one of my helmets (a more close fitting one) though I started to get some pain in my right ear in particular as though the helmet padding was putting pressure on the moulding. After half an hour this became noticeable, particularly when taking the helmet off. I've never had this with foam disposables using that helmet and my conclusion was / is that there was slightly too much material in the moulded plug. Cutting down on the amount used for moulding - or taking a Dremmel to the existing one, would mean less pressure. I didn't have time to do this before departure so I used a slightly looser fit helmet instead.

Over the next few days I was quite happy with the moulded plugs. Compared to the occasions when I rode short distances (on and off the ferry for example) without them the noise reduction was substantial. They remained easy to fit, they stayed in place over time and generally worked well. However, even with the looser fit helmet I was still getting some ear pain in my right ear and I decided one morning I'd go back to one of the two sets of (no name) disposable plugs I'd brought with me.

Properly fitted into my ear canal these were a revelation. I could hear almost nothing. All the wind noise vanished and the engine sounded more like a vacuum cleaner than a screechy two stroke. All I could hear was a kind of electric motor humming noise somewhere down around ground level. Even the annoying occasional fingernails on the blackboard squeal from my back brake sounded acceptable. How sensible this is is a different discussion but there's no arguing that they work extremely well.

There are other downsides to foam disposables as well as not being able to hear anything at all. Firstly you have to fit them into your ear canal and not just shove them loosely into your outer ear. Fitted like that they hardly work at all and are nothing like as good as the moulded ones. And that's the problem. You fit disposables by rolling / squashing them into a thin sliver and pushing them into your ear canal before they expand back out again. With a new pair you have maybe five or ten seconds before that happens. You can reuse them but each successive time they expand back faster and after somewhere between half a dozen and ten uses they expand faster than you can get them into your ear canal. That's when you have to replace them. Somewhere around use four or five onwards you can still get them in but only if you're quick / concentrating etc - and even then it can take three or four (or many more) attempts. That's the point at which you shove them in as best you can and leave them. Yesterday I was trying to get an over used disposable into my right ear while keeping an eye on a skip lorry reversing towards me in a carpark. Would I get the plug in before I had to get out of the lorry's way. Well, no. There's no way you can concentrate under those conditions so I just shoved it in as best I could and rode off. The moulded ones would have been a much better choice at that point (except I'd left them at home).

Conclusions - the disposables are much better at noise reduction but there is an argument that they're too good (not one I subscribe to but I know others do). They are however more difficult to fit - particularly if you reuse them. On a bike trip you're really going to have to reuse them unless you have the space to take a crate of them along with you. Blocked up ear canals also gave me some some adjustment problems (i.e. pain - a bit like having a cold) when changing altitude rapidly in the Alps. Moulded one are not as efficient but they may be good enough and they're much easier to use. Just watch out that you don't make then too big so they stick out from your ears. I suppose a professionally produced pair would take these points on board and through experience, better materials or whatever may produce something closer to the efficiency of the foam disposables, but they'll cost.

So how good do they need to be? How much noise is damaging? A few days ago I had to visit my local hospital for a periodic hearing checkup (about 10yrs years ago I damaged my left ear when a gun was fired too close to it). The hearing test came up with the same results as usual (normal right ear, slight reduction in my left) and I discussed ear plugs with the consultant. His opinion was that, from a hearing protection perspective, zero hearing as with the foam plugs is probably more than you need. A combination of a decent helmet and something like my moulded plugs would be fine. So that's what I'm going to go with. I'll have another go with the moulding gloop and see if I can improve things - but I've also ordered a box of disposables from eBay just in case.