New Hearing Protector Attenuation Measurement Method

摘要

Bone conduction loudness balance (BCLB), a new method for determining theattenuation of hearing protective devices (HPDs), was evaluated. When using BCLB for earplug testing with headphones, pure tones of equal frequency can be used for both the air conduction (AC) and bone conduction (BC) sounds with reasonable accuracy. Using BCLB with an external loudspeaker as the AC sound source makes it impossible to use pure tones of equal frequencies since the occlusion effect will cause an overestimation of attenuation at frequencies under 2000 hertz. A practical way to minimize the occlusion effect is to use a constant frequency noise band as the BC sound against which AC noise bands of varying frequency are