Calmer | Noise Reducing Ear Plugs Alternative

*Reason for buying* I had read about Calmers as a potential accommodation tool for people with autism and general sensory/perceptual sensitivities (which I have). *Outer Design Pros* They fit well, they are very discreet (in clear), their bag keeps them dry and clean. The bag is easy to recognize by touch if you have it in a laptop bag with other stuff. *Technical Design Pros* Some people have said that, after the 24h test, they took the Calmers out in noisy environments and immediately noticed the Calmers had been making a difference, because they became more anxious and irritable. I do not notice such a shift (which is a plus because it seems that wearing the Calmers a lot doesn't further lower your tolerance to sound). On whether it works for me- I can easily notice that mid to high pitched sounds are, indeed, muffled. Low pitch sound is unaffected, and I can still hear mids to highs pretty well. There is seemingly no decibel difference, just pitch. So, Flare is legit on those claims. Again, I haven't felt a distinct shift when I put them in or take them out. However, I have been far less anxious, irritable, and overwhelmed since I started to wear them (real result, placebo, or other cause- I don't know, but I'm sticking with it). Also, I can tolerate close proximity to very harsh noises like vacuuming (never could achieve this before). I feel as though I am able to function better in my noisy home, whereas before I was knowingly and frequently running away from noise. Noise can still be annoying sometimes, but it just seems more tolerable/manageable. *How/When I Wear Them* I place the Calmers in my ear as directed (logo/projection side facing the back of your head, not super far into your ear). They really don't work otherwise, so be sure to do that. I just put them in before any louder noises I expect to occur and/or that I suspect or know stress me out. So, for example, I will put them in when my family is settling down to watch TV. I haven't tried the Calmers at a noisy restaurant or public space yet. I so far didn't feel I needed them at those places, but I'm sure they will help there. I also reach for them if there is a louder noise in my environment and I notice that I am irritated or have a headache in the back of my head/neck (I learned recently that these headaches are often from overstimulation). The noise may not be the cause, but who knows? I grab my Calmers anyway. *Technical Design "Cons"* Nothing is a real con for me. I do notice some weirdness to my voice when I wear the Calmers. People call it "echoing" but it just sounds a bit muffled and low to me. Nothing bothersome over time, though. It can also be a bit harder to hear people. This was all expected, especially due to the range at which I and other people speak (mids I guess). You also can't wear earbuds for music with them, so headphones are good, or I just take them out. I originally wanted colored Calmers for fun (I don't actually like boring and discreet items), but I found the available colors to be ugly, and I see that the clear ones are actually a great choice. So, Flare could make nicer colors, but it's not that important. I am guessing that I can't wear my tragus piercing without affecting the Calmers' performance (haven't tried, they are bendy but it might still affect things). That's fine, as I'd rather wear the Calmers most of the time. It's not a problem existing for most potential buyers anyway, but I wanted to note that. *Overall* I love the Calmers, and I think the price is fair for the materials used and how they have helped and will help me. I would definitely suggest splurging on accommodating yourself (I know Calmers are not that expensive, but I was still dragging my feet to buy them). Accommodating yourself in health is not shameful (you aren't being overly dramatic), it definitely helps you to live a little and be more productive, it is needed, it is worth the price, and it opens up space to be happier. 10/10 great tool for sensory sensitivity.

****Edited review after my order was corrected**** I was shipped Minis in error at first but Amazon quickly replaced them for the correct size. I tested them for 2 full months and these are my thoughts as a neurodivergent person with Auditory Procesing Disorder and general noise sensitivity: * The standard size of Flare Calmers is still very small and feel tiny enough to fall out at random. However, when you follow the wear directions and ensure they're inserted correctly, they don't actually fall out. The only times mine do fall is when I kept messing with my ears, hair, and the Flares, throughout the day. I do moderate exercising and competitive bowling while wearing mine and they stay in place despite the sensation that they aren't securely seated. * These aren't miracle sound blockers. You will still hear all of the annoying chewing sounds, pings, clangs, ticks, smacking sounds, and so on. These do indeed take the edge off a little bit, but you still need your full scope of coping skills to manage your daily auditory stressors. *Be warned, mine made some sound frequencies slightly altered and uncomfortable until I adjusted to the changes with prolonged wear. It wasn't the worst, but some pitches and tones sounded slightly skewed. It stopped being noticeable after a week. *These were most helpful to me with consistent wear. When I first put them in, it seemed they made absolutely zero difference at all and I wanted to throw them away. But after long daily wear for a few days, I noticed a huge difference when I took them out. The slight buffer was gone and the world suddenly sounded sharp and harsh again. *These help with my APD by gently buffering the sharpest parts of ambient noise so I can spend my mental energy focusing on words and lip reading. I still have to combat competing noises, and these don't make me magically hear speech more clearly. But they do help give my focused energy just enough of a break to be able to concentrate more on the conversation task. *Extremely easy to keep clean *Easy to lose if you're prone to absent mindedly setting things down and forgetting. *Cats are idiots and will try to eat them if you're not careful. *NO Occlusion Effect, unlike my Loop Engage plugs which gave me severe Occlusion Effect issues. *These have been an excellent tool for daily wear and I plan on buying another pair of Flare Calmers. I prefer these over Loop Engage when it comes to situations where I do need to be able to hear conversation and my surroundings clearly.

I like that they mute the sound somewhat, not a lot, just enough to notice. However I was in a noisy area yesterday and could not hear or focus on the person talking to directly to me. What I have seen with video reviews and audio test is that they change the direction the sound is coming from and basically take away your echo location ability or hamper it., that then mutes noises or lessens certain ranges I literally could not tell where this person was speaking from and it was distracting. I had to take out one just to focus on him enough to hear him. With bone conducting headphone they seem to enhance the depth of the sound and make it better almost like regular headphone would sound. They don't block any noise so really do not do anything to crowd noise. However because its changing the direction of the crowd noise it seems to help me focus less on the crowd but also hinder listening to one person talking to me. At work we have to leave our doors open all day and it makes it heard to focus. They do not get ride of the noise form others, but do mute it a little. There is also a whining noise in my office and I noticed it immediately after taking them out, so that was a plus. What I really hate is that one falls out constantly. I am not sure if it's too big or too small. The other two bothersome things are the itchiness, which apparently is normal and the slightly underwater feeling of sound. I like that I don't get full occlusion with these like the loop ear plugs. I do get some. I have misophonia and I can't stand mouth noises from others and wearing the loop makes me hate myself when eating these less so but its still there. The loop helps much better with the mouth noises from others because it blocks a lot more sound all together. The loop also blocks a lot more crowd noise and help for loud noises close to me. I have yet to test these in a game night with 7 friends who get loud and often trigger me. That test will come in the next month. These have their place and so do the loop. Neither solve my issues but they do help a little.

Update: Ehhhh gonna have to eat my words. I just got the Loop Experience earplugs in the mail and they are NOT IT. They were made for concerts and music so it makes sense that they didn't work for what I needed. It's like the volume was turned down on everything, but the annoying sounds (the water tap making that noise, the drawers closing like *that*) were more noticeable. Flare Calmer might be more expensive but at least it works. (On the other hand, I REALLY like the Loop Quiet for sleeping!) Oh, and I finally met 2 people who I cannot understand/hear when I am using Flare Calmer. So I cannot wear the Calmer ear plugs when I'm talking to them. I really wish the Flare Calmer came in multipacks or went on sale once in a while. Original review: I've worn these Flare Calmer ear plugs nearly every single day for the past month. They are an absolute life saver. Having a TV on all the time stresses me out and I always have to wear foam ear plugs when I vacuum because the noise gets overwhelming. With these ear plugs, I am able to just do these everyday things without adding too much to my stress level. I still retreat to my quiet room once in a while, but browsing my phone in a noisy room has finally become bearable. I think there was one day where I forgot to wear them to work... not making that mistake again! It takes away the sharp edges of others' voices. They fit pretty well even though my ear canals are uneven; one of them has a tendency to go too far in, but it's not a big deal. I sometimes take them out while eating, because they amplify the chewing sounds in my head and sometimes the chewing motion makes them fall out. Occasionally I have difficulty pronouncing words since I miss some inflections in my voice because of the earplugs, at which point I'll rip one out of my ear to finish my sentence. It rarely affects how well I hear others, though, which is amazing. I don't wear them at night because one of them has a tendency to leave dents/sore spots on the inside part of my tragus. If these were cheaper (say, $20, instead of $30), I would buy multiple pairs to make sure I am never without them. Alas, they're $30 a pair. I'm going to explore the competitors' products which run more like $15-25. (May I suggest selling sets/multiples for a discount?)

The ad says this is NOT an ear PLUG, and that is correct. 1. It seems to cut overall room volume by around 3 to 5 decibels. An increase of 3 decibels is an increase of sound pressure of 100%. That doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t. At a rock concert, these won’t help. But I play at a number of jams of various sorts on various instruments. Generally these are acoustic, except for a mic and maybe a u-bass. With twenty people playing at once, though, everything together can reach ninety decibels or a little louder, which is unpleasant. 3-5 dB brings the volume down to a less damaging level. (But it’s not just the volume, but the force of lots of instruments playing at that volume. If it were just one instrument, there would be no problem. Amplifier gain increases are worse than volume increases because the sound seems thicker.) 2. In a room with lots of people talking, that horrible noise is less horrible, more unidirectional, less like hail crashing on a helmet I’m wearing. 3. In a music situation, the acoustic instruments still sound pretty accurate (more than any others I’ve tried), but just turned down a little. Sometimes a little is all it takes. 4. I can sing while using these and still sound like myself—just a little quieter. When I talk, I don’t sound to myself like I’m in my head. 5. I can still hear conversations and what is going on, but it’s a little harder to hear consonant sounds, and the high end of the sound of guitar strings is fainter. If what these do is what you need, try them. I went to two jams today. One was peaking at 88 dB and the other at 90. On some songs a couple decibels louder if everyone was singing enthusiastically. For the first jam, these were enough. For the second, I switched to a set of Minuendo High Fidelity Adjustable earplugs. These cut out a lot more of the volume, but also most of the pleasure of playing with others. I’m seventy. Generally my hearing is very sensitive, but several years ago I began suffering from Temporary Threshold Shift, which is where loud noise makes the cilia in my inner ear get paralyzed, so it sounds like I’m hearing underwater. While the hearing comes back, this temporary paralysis may cause some permanent damage, too. If I go to a concert with amps and drums, after a couple songs, my hearing is paralyzed, and then the concert becomes torture. So I’ve given up going to that sort of concert. Now I’m just trying to not damage my hearing when I play at jams.

Reason for purchase; misophonia and auditory hypersensitivity associated with autism and sensory processing disorder. Before getting these things, I was reluctant to spend the money and deeply skeptical of how effective they would be for one reason; most of the product literature on Flare Audio's website and their advertisements were fairly vague about the details of what they did and how they worked in a way that set off snake oil alarm bells. When an explanation is vague as to why you should stick rubber tubes in your ear to alter your mood, my skeptic sense tingles. I can't help it. I'm a scientist. Nonetheless, I decided to give them a try. I have enough of an acoustics knowledge and well-trained enough ear to be able to hear in detail what exactly they're doing (if they're doing ANYTHING), so I'm not exactly going to be tricked easily by a placebo effect in this area. Over the last week or so my skepticism has been replaced with admiration and delight; these things work, they work well, and they work for very good reasons. There's a few things going on here; 1. They're bypassing the external anatomy of the ear, making hearing more directional and a hair less sensitive 2. They're altering the internal acoustic properties of the ear canal Let me break this down a bit further; Our ears act as acoustic collecting dishes, in particular the hollow adjacent to the ear canal. If you're bypassing that, then less sound is being directed into the ear canal in general, and this also has the effect of making hearing slightly more directional without amplifying in the way something like an ear trumpet would. So how does this help? When you have an auditory hypersensitivity from a processing disorder, you can't filter out environmental sounds normally, and by making hearing more directional you're cutting out a huge percentage of the sound reverberation your ears are picking up. Every echo in a room adds to the auditory chaos around you, so by removing a measure of that from your awareness, and slightly deadening sounds coming from behind you, it becomes a lot easier to decipher and focus on sounds in front of you that you're trying to give your attention to. The best way I could describe the shift in auditory sensation is that it's like suddenly all the surfaces in the room are covered in sound-dampening acoustic foam. As for altering the acoustic properties of the ear canal itself, it's also deadening sound reflection. This has an effect not unlike turning down the gain on an amplifier. A lot of high frequency and upper midrange sounds are dampened very slightly. Electrical hum and buzz is really effectively notched out. In general audiophile terms, it makes the sound profile "warmer." In a relatively quiet room, the differences in your auditory perception will be fairly negligible. The louder and more chaotic your environment, the greater degree of difference will become apparent. I didn't even grok how effective they were until I'd been wearing them to the grocery store a few times, and then took them out while shopping. I'm telling you, the sudden auditory assault when I removed them legitimately stunned me. I wasn't even cognizant of how much auditory input they were notching out until suddenly it all came screaming back. I honestly wish Flare Audio did a more effective and detailed job of explaining the functioning of these things on the website. As it is, it sorta took trying them myself to understand the principles they're operating on. That being said, these things are amazing, worth every penny, and I'll probably never go anywhere without a pair ever again. These are a shockingly effective tool to counter sensory overwhelm, so I guess I shouldn't have been so skeptical of sticking rubber tubes in my ear.

I'm autistic and ADHD. I have trouble with audio processing and noise sensitivity. This is the second ear plug product thing I've tried (also tried loops) and I think it's an overpriced piece of rubber. They are kind of awkward to put in and feel like they are ready to fall out easily. I wouldn't be too hard on it, if it was priced appropriately. I mean come on, look at it, look at it in your hand. That should be multiples for 10 bucks. I'm pretty desperate for a product that will allow me to tolerate 'loud' spaces like restaurants, stores, anything with more than a few people in it, while still being able to hear the world around me and interact with it: This may just be pure fantasy for somebody like me. It will reduce sound a bit, but that is a double edged sword when you need to hear your name being called out or anything. I just feel like there's no happy medium with this type of product. You either muffle too much sound, or you slightly muffle everything and wonder what the point is. It did help me from feeling overwhelmed in a waiting room, but then I had to take them out to actually talk to somebody. So, as long as you don't care to actually talk to anybody, and just want to tolerate the grocery store or something, these can be useful. If you are like me, chances are you've long since discovered headphones. If you are a bit self conscious about wearing headphones or would just rather not, I guess these are okay, but get the ones that are tethered so you don't lose them. I think they called them Flare Secure or something like that. Don't get me wrong, you can talk in these, and I have no idea what it's like for a normal person, but for me and my problems, it's still hard to separate voices from other voices and background noise. There's less background noise, but conversing is still an issue.

I wanted to allow myself time to get used to these before reviewing it. I have sudden hearing loss on one side, which has been mostly a nightmare. People think it's not a big deal, but we were born with two ears because we need both of them to function properly. Since losing half my hearing, I have no more balance, no center. Unless you're half deaf, you just don't realize how much you lose when you only hear on one side. I can't tell which direction the noise comes from or how far away. Everything is just noise, at the same level, all the time. If someone is talking on my left, I can't hear it over whatever is happening on my right. When someone calls my name from a distance, I have no idea of knowing where they are unless I see them. This is dangerous in some situations because sometimes the sounds I don't hear are cars, and thankfully I have a dog who warns me before something like that can happen. At some point, it's just stimulation overload and I get migraines, dizziness, vertigo, etc, and I just stay home. What I'm trying to say is I have been looking for something to make sounds more bearable, and I think I finally found it in Flare Audio's Calmer. So with all that in mind, here's what I think of it: - It does what it claims. When in place, sounds no longer sound like one big sheet of noise. It's like the difference between using your TV's stereo and upgrading to a home theater. Sounds sound more layered, like I'm finally hearing them as I should before only being able to hear on one side. I still hear on one side, but the sounds seem more organized. - I don't know how much it helps with tinnitus, but I have tinnitus, and if there is an improvement, it's subtle. But I'll give that more time. After all, some ongoing problems won't go away instantly, so expectations have to be realistic. - Sounds seem crisper. I feel like I'm hearing things I missed previously. - I have a bone-anchored hearing aid on my deaf side, though it doesn't work very well. A bone-anchored hearing aid (BAHA) is one of the ways the deaf can hear again, using bone conduction to allow sound to travel from the deaf side to the hearing side. The idea is to allow your brain to feel like you're hearing on both ears, but really all the sound is just traveling to the hearing side, and when in harmony, it works just well enough to make life bearable. In reality, it's far from ideal, and the device was almost useless to me. But with Calmer in my hearing ear, it helps the sound from my hearing aid become more focused because it eliminated a lot of white noise and just lets me hear more efficiently. It's truly wonderful, and I almost cried because it's been a few years since being able to hear with that much quality. It's not perfect, but it's the best I can hope for with one functioning ear. That's my honest testament to this device. - Lastly, the bummer of this device: it doesn't stay in place. I bought the standard size, not the mini. If you're not sure which size to get, get the standard. Unless you know you have smaller ear canals (you will have known that by now because any doctor would have mentioned it), it's best to get the standard. But it is easily dislodged. I don't have a very active lifestyle anymore, so I don't do things that would cause it to be dislodged, but it always happens. A regular activity like having a conversation or walking can dislodge this thing because it needs to be redesigned to fit better. It won't fall completely out. Between your tragus and antitragus, you'll feel something different and touch your ear and realize the device is resting there, instead of in its place. I don't have super waxy ears and that's the only thing I can think of that could cause the device to keep dislodging. I just think it's a design flaw. So, when the device is in place, it's wonderful. The design needs to be reconfigured to not fall out so easily, but otherwise, what a great idea. It's a game-changer and I'm so glad I got it. As with anything you put in your ear, be careful, educate yourself, and even talk to your audiologist. But this is a great product. If it was on Shark Tank, I think the panel would go for it. The company's website has more products as well, and it's worth looking into. Good luck!

These are brilliant. They dont block out noise so much as soften the sharp edges. I forget I have them in (so no trouble hearing people) until they get a bit irritating after about 8 hours.

Funcionan, cumplen su funcion

These help so much in noisy environments to take the edge off. They are easy to wear.

Die kleinen Plugs sind sehr hilfreich bei Störgeräuschen oder zu lauten Gesprächspartnern. Sie dämpfen etwas ab, aber lassen dennoch alles gut vernehmen. In lauten Städten könnten sie zu schwach sein. Pluspunkt ist ihr supra weiches Material. Sehr angenehm zum tragen, auch für längere Zeit. Und waschbar.

Bought the normal size Calmer (not the mini). My ear size is medium on any earbuds. But the calmer keeps on sliding out of my ear. It's so small and won't fit properly. No change on the surrounding noise. No improvement. Just a little bit of reduction.