Reusable ear bud style ear plug specifically for motorcycles
Comfortable ear bud
Initial Thoughts
Motosafe is the motorcycle specific product created by earplug specialists Alpine and follows along from their musicsafe line in creating an ear bud styled plug that is easy to clean and reuse and also comfortable to wear. They really do feel like nothing at all in the hand and are so light it belies their effectiveness.
Construction
Made from a silicone feeling rubber they are soft and supple and mould completely into your ear canal without feeling intrusive, the Motosafe comes with 2 different attenuating filters in green for average sound levels or yellow for a more noisy environment, being inside a helmet the yellow filter was chosen and away I went.
To test the effectiveness of the Motosafe plugs I tried them with 3 different helmets that I know give very different noise levels, first of these was a Nitro V1200 that I know is surprisingly quiet. The Motosafe performed admirably here with both the green and yellow filters and there was no noticable wind boom or ear-ringing after wearing them, moving on to the KBC Force RR the noise levels were around the same when wearing the plugs despite the actual helmet being a touch louder than the Nitro. Finally the Shark RSF3 was donned and as this is already quite a noisy helmet on me I fitted both sets of filters to see the results, with the green filters there was a noticable low level boom still at certain speeds that resonates slightly in the ear, this led to a little ear ringing after coming away from the bike but nothing too serious, the yellow filters performed a little better and the boom was reduced even further - I say reduced as it was not totally removed but on the flip side I also didnt lose any ambient sound from the bike or traffic.
These I think are a great little ear plug for someone who does not want to go for a full on custom moulded plug, someone who needs to hear what is going on around them without going deaf in the process, they work very differently to the normal sponge/foam plugs by not blocking out the sound and this works brilliantly on the road.
