Don’t get a gun in some obscure caliber. Get a pistol in 9mm or a riffle in 223 (even better get a 5.56x45 NATO) or 308 win, that way ammo will be cheaper and you can better afford training with it. Shooting a few hundred rounds is not really enough. You’ll need to train regularly.
Learn how to maintain your gun. As in how to clean it, what parts need lubrication, adjusting the sights, etc.
Speaking as an electronic engineer, get passive ear protection. Active noise cancelling is cool and all, but what about when the batteries run out and you have no protection? Or what the electronics fail? Protect your ears, but when you can get +100 rounds of ammo for the price difference, then I would prioritize the ammo budget.
For consumer bluetooth earbuds with a high level of latency (think what you’d use on your phone), certainly - which is why you should never try to use everyday use headphones as genuine hearing protection for things such as industrial environments or gunshots.
Dedicated hearing protection devices perform all their audio functions locally with almost no latency at all (unless you count using an aux jack in conjunction for something like two-way radios, which don’t interfere with the noise cancelling).
TL;DR - yes for devices not designed to protect your ears, no for devices designed as hearing protection (because of their specific design and operation).
From what I understand, typically audio compression has about 20 ms of ramp-up, though it can be theoretically lowered about ten times — not sure how well it would work in that case, though. Consider that aural reaction speed is apparently way better than visual, wherein the latter is on the order of 200 ms. As is confirmed by musicians hearing a lag of around 15 ms. This leads me to believe that human hearing would probably pick up the shots sound before noise cancellation kicks in, otherwise the cancellation is too sensitive for anything else to be heard.
Of course, this skips the most important aspect of, how much sound pressure would be dangerous to one’s ears with different kinds of protection — with which I’m not versed at all.
Whenever this comes up I like to add:
And don’t forget cardio
I wonder if active noise canceling doesn’t have a delay that pretty much nullifies said protection in the case of quick loud bangs.
For consumer bluetooth earbuds with a high level of latency (think what you’d use on your phone), certainly - which is why you should never try to use everyday use headphones as genuine hearing protection for things such as industrial environments or gunshots.
Dedicated hearing protection devices perform all their audio functions locally with almost no latency at all (unless you count using an aux jack in conjunction for something like two-way radios, which don’t interfere with the noise cancelling).
TL;DR - yes for devices not designed to protect your ears, no for devices designed as hearing protection (because of their specific design and operation).
From what I understand, typically audio compression has about 20 ms of ramp-up, though it can be theoretically lowered about ten times — not sure how well it would work in that case, though. Consider that aural reaction speed is apparently way better than visual, wherein the latter is on the order of 200 ms. As is confirmed by musicians hearing a lag of around 15 ms. This leads me to believe that human hearing would probably pick up the shots sound before noise cancellation kicks in, otherwise the cancellation is too sensitive for anything else to be heard.
Of course, this skips the most important aspect of, how much sound pressure would be dangerous to one’s ears with different kinds of protection — with which I’m not versed at all.