Hacker News Reader

Comment by Caligatio | Hacker News Reader

I'm not claiming to be an earplug engineer but I feel like it shouldn't be hard to ensure your product literally does the one thing it's supposed to do: block sound. Particularly if you know that your earplugs are going to be extensively used in very loud environments, i.e. combat.

I hope the $5.5B is well in excess of the military contract's price tag.

View on HN

Is it that simple? Ears come in all sizes and shapes, its possible you could make an earplug that worked great for you but not for some other people.

Peeping at news articles though, there may have been an internal memo where they admitted to knowing there was a mistake - but they continued to sell them. Very likely THAT is where the huge fine came. see https://www.greenmatters.com/business/3m-ear-plug-lawsuit

> Ears come in all sizes and shapes, its possible you could make an earplug that worked great for you but not for some other people.

But then it wouldn't be a legal issue since all earplug vendors would have the same issue, and it wouldn't be feasible to have a design that corrects it.

It is absolutely not that simple, for the reasons you name amongst others.

That would be more simple... if that was what these were designed to do.

One of the requirements for these custom-made ear plugs were was to allow the user to hear quiet conversations when used in a certain way.

There are these "audiophile" earphones from companies like Etymotic that are basically earplugs that block all frequencies equally and still make sound good enough to rival the top end of regular headphones, yet we don't hear of those kicking the bucket.

> There are these "audiophile" earphones from companies like Etymotic that are basically earplugs that block all frequencies equally and still make sound good enough to rival the top end of regular headphones, yet we don't hear of those kicking the bucket.

I don't know if you've tried to use those next to lots of rifle fire, but they don't work that great. If we're talking about their ~$40 passive earplugs, the sound reduction isn't sufficient for rifles, even with a perfect fit. You're still over 145dB after the earplugs. It's explicitly not for use with gunshots, it says so on the box.

If you're talking about the active ones marketed for shooting sports (which incidentally don't block all frequencies equally), it's okay reduction for outdoor rifle (still painful for indoor rifle). It's much more passable for pistol than super loud rifles (let alone artillery/etc).

Plus those are $300 a pair, and the 3m plugs in question were what, $10?

Very different use case. Those have a transducer (speaker) inside the plug. What you'd actually need to do what they want is active threshold-trigger, or perhaps just really good ANC.

Edit: Also the difference between $200+ custom molds and plugs, vs foam ones that need to cost a few cents each.

Ah, the ol’ hacker news “Dropbox is just S3” post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com