MOTO+ Earplugs for Motorcycle and Wind Noise ★★★★★ (11,199)

This is the objection that keeps most riders unprotected – and it’s based on a misunderstanding of what’s actually happening inside your helmet at speed.

At 70 mph, wind roar inside your helmet is generating 100 dB or more of broadband noise. That constant hammering doesn’t just damage your hearing – it actively masks the sounds you actually need to hear: sirens, horns, car doors, other bikes. Wind noise is drowning out your situational awareness, not protecting it.

This isn’t opinion. A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine found that at speeds above 40 mph, riders wearing earplugs detected warning signals more reliably than those without. The plugs removed the wind roar that was masking the danger signals. You hear sirens and horns more clearly with filtered earplugs at motorway speeds than without.

You’re not plugging your ears. You’re removing the noise that’s stopping you hearing what matters.

Completely understood – and this is exactly why cheap foam earplugs are not the answer. Foam blocks everything equally: the wind roar, yes, but also your engine note, your exhaust, the mechanical feedback that tells you when to change gear, what the bike is doing, whether something sounds wrong.

Foam plugs make every bike sound like an electric scooter. That’s not a trade-off any serious rider should have to make.

bollsen earplugs work differently. Medical-grade silicone, precisely sized to your ear canal via AR KI TECH, with acoustic filtering that targets the high-frequency wind turbulence band. The howl goes. The engine stays. The exhaust note stays. The mechanical feedback stays.

Riders who’ve made the switch consistently describe it the same way: “Wind gone, bike still there.” The soundtrack of the ride doesn’t disappear – it just gets cleaned up. Some riders say they can actually hear their engine better once the wind roar isn’t fighting it for attention.

You might be right. Or you might be one of the majority of riders whose high-frequency hearing has already shifted without them noticing – because noise-induced hearing loss is silent, gradual, and doesn’t come with a warning event.

The tell-tale signs most riders miss:

• Struggling to follow conversation in a noisy pub
• Asking people to repeat themselves more than you used to
• TV volume creeping up over the years
• Ringing in your ears after a long ride that you’ve written off as normal
• Difficulty hearing the higher frequencies – birdsong, certain consonants in speech

A Bennetts BikeSocial test team member put it plainly after getting an audiogram: “A small slot is missing from my audiogram in both ears that equates to the frequency of wind noise. I genuinely have hearing damage caused by riding.” He hadn’t noticed it either.

More than 81% of former motorcyclists report they did not wear hearing protection during their riding careers. Most of those riders said the same thing you just said, for most of those years.

This is probably the most common myth in motorcycling – and it’s costing riders their hearing.

Your helmet reduces wind noise by approximately 7–10 dB. That sounds reasonable until you look at what you’re starting with:

• 70 mph motorway: ~100 dB inside the helmet after reduction
• 62 mph: ~95 dB – and at that level, permanent hearing damage can occur in just 15 minutes (German ADAC research)
• 40 mph: ~90 dB – above the UK legal employer action threshold for workplace noise

A premium, well-fitting helmet helps. A neck buff helps slightly. But no helmet on the market reduces wind noise enough to bring motorway-speed riding below the damage threshold. The physics don’t allow it – the turbulence is generated by airflow around the helmet shape itself, not just sound getting in.

Your helmet keeps you alive in a crash. It doesn’t protect your hearing on a long ride. Those are two different problems.

Here’s what’s happening inside your lid at different speeds:

• 40 mph — ~90 dB. Above the threshold where sustained exposure causes damage.
• 60 mph — ~95–100 dB. Safe exposure time: under one hour.
• 70 mph — ~100 dB. Safe unprotected exposure: roughly 4 minutes.
• Motorway overtake / open throttle — up to 110 dB. Damage potential: near-immediate.

For context: 85 dB is the level at which UK employers are legally required to provide hearing protection to workers. Your daily motorway commute – 45 minutes each way on the M-roads – is the acoustic equivalent of working a pneumatic drill shift without ear defenders, every single day.

And unlike your job, nobody is monitoring it, nobody is legally responsible for it, and nobody will be there when the damage finally shows up on an audiogram.

994,000 UK motorcyclists are currently doing this unprotected. Fewer than 29% regularly use any hearing protection at all.

Fair. Foam plugs are the wrong tool for riding – and the fact that most riders’ only experience of earplugs is cheap foam has poisoned the well for an entire generation of motorcyclists.

Here’s why foam fails on the bike:

• SNR 33–35 foam plugs block everything by the same amount – wind, engine, sirens, conversation, all muffled equally
• The result is the “bubble” feeling – removed, disconnected, unsafe
• Bone conduction of vibration through the helmet padding can feel amplified, not reduced
• They get painful inside a helmet after 60–90 minutes under pressure
• They’re fiddly to insert with gloves on and fall out when you pull your helmet off

bollsen earplugs are medical-grade silicone with acoustic filters specifically tuned to target the high-frequency wind turbulence band – the harmful frequencies – while leaving the mid-range intact. Sized to your exact ear canal via AR KI TECH, so they seal properly without being crammed in. Comfortable across a full day’s riding.

The foam earplug experience is not what hearing protection feels like. It’s just what bad hearing protection feels like.

Filtering is exactly where correctly sized earplugs earn their keep – and here’s why.

When you’re filtering at 15–20 mph through stopped or slow traffic, the biggest audio threats are low to mid-frequency sounds: a car door swinging open, a driver suddenly revving, a cyclist appearing between vehicles, a pedestrian stepping out. Those are speech-range frequencies – 250 Hz to 3 kHz. Filtered earplugs don’t touch those. They pass through clearly.

What filtering also involves – especially in heavy traffic on a hot day with your engine ticking over – is sustained exposure to the combined noise of dozens of engines, buses, horns, and aircon units around you. That background adds up.

The argument that earplugs are dangerous for filtering is based on foam plugs. Foam blocks indiscriminately. Properly filtered plugs in the right size don’t create a bubble – they remove the high-frequency band that damages your cochlea while keeping the situational audio you need. The HSE specifically notes that hearing protection should not reduce ambient sound below 70 dB – which is exactly the design target of a quality filtered earplug.

You’re a skilled rider. Protect accordingly.

The ringing has a clinical name: temporary threshold shift (TTS). Your cochlea has been pushed past its recovery capacity. The fact that it resolves overnight doesn’t mean nothing happened – it means your cochlea managed to recover this time.

Every time it happens, that recovery is fractionally less complete. One day the ring doesn’t settle by morning. Then it doesn’t settle by the end of the week. Then it doesn’t settle at all.

Riders who’ve been through it describe tinnitus in terms that make the risk very concrete:

• “It’s not about the hearing loss. It’s the noise in my head, 24/7, that has replaced it.”
• “A high-pitched whine that never shuts down.”
• “I’m pretty scared it’s not going to go away. I can’t see myself being able to relax enough to ride again.”
• “Is riding motorcycles over for me?” — actual thread title from a rider one week after a single unprotected freeway ride

There is no treatment for noise-induced hearing loss. There is no cure for tinnitus. There is only the riding you do before it happens, and everything you adjust around it after.

The ringing after a long ride is not fine. It’s a warning. It won’t keep giving you warnings indefinitely.