Earphones

[Aprilian]

That depends on helmet and fairing.   With fairing if the turbulence is at your neck it will be low hZ.  Naked bike with ill fitting face shield will be much higher frequency - think whistling.  I tend to push the spoken word frequencies for best personal enjoyment (think bell curve on equalizer).

[T.W. Day]

I did a Geezer column on this silliness a while back and it turned out to be one of the most inflammatory things I'd written. (http://home.comcast.net/~twday60/geezer/geezer77.htm) I even had  goofballs claiming one of my sources, Sarah Angerman from the UofM, was invented. It was pretty hilarious, since this territory is where  make my living and most of the ranting letter writers were obviously freaked out about their current loss of hearing.

My personal favorite comment was, "Wearing ear plugs, I can't ride for more than 100 miles listening to my tinnitus screaming in my head. . . " This guy went on to tell me that he'd rather go deaf than be stuck hearing that self-generated noise. That's not how it works. The more "deaf" you get, the louder the tinnitus will become as the neural-generated tinnitus "tones" overwhelm the acoustic signals sent from the vanishing cilia in your cochlea. Clapton, Townshend, and Phil Collins describe their tinnitus symptoms as "a loud metallic waterfall that never lets up and is always the loudest thing in whatever room I'm in."

Audiologists are looking forward to your future business (http://children.webmd.com/guide/hearing-loss-mp3s). Yep, it's true. They do call the 18-40 year old group, the "MP3 Generation." You are going to be big money makers for the hearing aid manufacturers, since you're going deaf faster than my generation. More 30 year olds are hearing impaired than 60 year-olds, percentage wise. Get ready for a lifetime of "get an ear horn" jokes from the few of you who can hear.

[smokechaser]

Audiologists are looking forward to your future business (http://children.webmd.com/guide/hearing-loss-mp3s). Yep, it's true. They do call the 18-40 year old group, the "MP3 Generation." You are going to be big money makers for the hearing aid manufacturers, since you're going deaf faster than my generation. More 30 year olds are hearing impaired than 60 year-olds, percentage wise. Get ready for a lifetime of "get an ear horn" jokes from the few of you who can hear.

What are your recommendations, still staying within the MN laws?  One noise canceling earbud with music only?  One earbud and one earplug?  Two ear plugs?

I have noticed the ringing in my ears after a long ride.  At this point it still goes away, would like to prevent it from being permanent!

[T.W. Day]

A pretty good rule of thumb is both "if it hurts to hear, it's hurting your hearing" and if you experience noise that causes ringing, you've done some amount of permanent damage. We're all different, but the hearing mechanism is incredibly fragile and not that well designed for the modern environment. I recommend shelving the ear phones and going for the best ear plugs you can find. Both ears, almost all of the time.

The math is pretty straight forward and solidly points in every direction away from sound in the helmet. I use in-ear phones, all the time, to mix in live recording environments. That's, even, pushing the boundaries of safe practice. In R&R situations, I put my Shure in-ears (36dB of isolation, mid-band) inside of my industrial ear protectors (38dB of isolation from 250Hz to 12.5kHz and 29dB of isolation from 62.5-250Hz) to give myself a little dynamic range while monitoring the recording. Helmets are miserable protection, sometimes actually magnifying air flow and SPL inside the helmet. So, I don't count that as any sort of protection. Many audiologists (and me) have done measurements in a helmet at highway speeds and the general consensus is that the noise level in a helmet is between 85dBSPL and 120+SPL; depending on the helmet (3/4 helmets are the worst offenders), fairing and windshield, motorcycle exhaust noise, speed, and environmental conditions. So, getting 36dB of attenuation from your ear plugs or in-ears just brings the noise level down to "marginally harmful" in many/most cases.