Elgin Ruckus Earplug Earbuds with Mic 25 dB Noise Reduction Wired Earbuds Safety Ear Plugs Headphones OSHA Compliant

First of all, these are $20 ear buds and this review is based off of that fact. If you want audiophile level products, don’t buy $20 ear buds. I feel like I’m writing a don’t drink the drain cleaner warning ⚠️! I bought these to use with my motorcycle helmet. I have just received them today and haven’t done any riding with them yet, but, I have put my helmet on with them in my ears and it was fairly uneventful. If you’re a motorcycle rider and have been looking for under helmet earbuds, you’ll appreciate that statement. I can feel a little pressure with the helmet on, but, I’m sure that will fade with use. As with any new earplug or earbud, there is an acclimation process. I work in the mining industry where hearing protection is mandatory. I know a little bit about the subject because of that. These ear buds do cancel out a good bit of noise. If you put them in correctly they work great as ear plugs. (To put them in, put your right arm over your head and with your fingers grab the top of your left ear. Pull up and back just a little and insert the earbud with your left hand. No need to jam the thing clear to your ear drum! Repeat for the right ear. Also use this same method to remove them. Do not grab the wire and pull. Grab the silicone sleeve the wire sticks out of and pull the earbud out.) Some reviews complain of poor sound quality. I disagree. I am quite pleasantly surprised with the audio quality of these buds. The bass is plenty good enough and actually quite good. The mid range is good, but, the highs are little lacking giving it just a hint of muffled sound. Still, overall these earbuds do sound good. I find these earbuds to be comfortable. As I have already stated, any new in ear device is going to take some time to get acclimated to. Having said that, these seem to be pretty good from the start for me. Some people have said that they are too big for their ears. That is understandable for some people. These have a speaker in them so the they aren’t quite as small around the base or as flexible as stand alone ear plugs of this design. So, I can see where some people might have a problem with that. I find the volume level to be more than sufficient. Some reviews say they are too quiet. Not sure what is going on there. Max volume on my Samsung Galaxy and My iPhone XS is a bit uncomfortably loud for me, however they are still clear and no distortion is noticeable. As I said, I just received these today and these are my impressions so far. I hope to do some riding tonight to test these out under riding conditions and add to this review how they performed. I hope to be able to come back to this review months down the road to say they are still working well. We will see! EDIT: After a couple of days of riding I am happy to report that these are incredible. Too incredible, as a matter of fact. The noise cancelling is so good that don’t hear some of the things I probably need to hear. Having said that, they perform quite well. The audio quality while riding is great. Without a helmet you get some noise from the wind blowing on the wires, but, it does not over power the audio. With a helmet it is a very quiet ride except for what ever music or audio you choose to listen too. Read more

Look, to jump straight to the elephant in the room, people where I work on the factory floor only know plugphones. Competition is good though, right? I've used both Plugphones and Elgin products and as of today I will recommend Elgin Every. Single. Time. Ear protection is fantastic. Cuts down on high decibels like a charm, but I can still hear voices near me quite well. The isolation/protection is fantastic, much better than Plugphones. Sound quality: Holy crap this blows Plugphones out of the water! Because of the better isolation, Elgin will give you a much better low response. Also, these get much, much louder than Plugphones! Whether that's a good thing or bad thing depends on your perspective, but I love it. Just stay safe and know your limits. Fit and issues: I have EXTREMELY small ear canals, and these were distinctly uncomfortable when I first bought them. Kinda like my steel toe boots though, they break in and after one or two weeks then they are fine and feel great. If that's you too, just hang in there. They are worth it! My one qualm is there is no way to clean these. You will notice ear wax building up inside them and while you can squeeze some of it out I haven't found a way to clean them thoroughly. Also while squeezing them I knocked the protective screens off of both drivers, so that's not good. They still work well, but it is disconcerting and I wish I could clean them better regularly since they are not disposable ear plugs. Oh well, still a 5/5 product for me! Read more

I'm going to lead with the fact that I work as a millwright and bought these for my work radio. It's a Motorola CP200d. That's less important for compatibility than your handset though, make sure yours has an audio jack before buying, not all radio handsets do. (90 day update at the bottom.) The sound dampening is good, they function as regular ear plugs and I don't feel like my hearing is in danger even in the loudest parts of the mill. The fit is decent, I'm not normally a fan of the flanged silicone style ear plug, I've always found them painful in my ears by the end of the day, but these are made from a very soft silicone that's grippy but not uncomfortable. The sound quality is decent but nothing to write home about. I would have rated higher, but there's a concussive burst at the start of each transmission that's distracting till you get used to it, which takes a few hours. Other than that I can hear pretty clearly and it's helping a lot with my ability to communicate when I'm working in high noise areas, particularly when I have to have muffs over my plugs. My actual cons for this are in the pic. The plugs stuck straight out of my ears. A bend at the end of the plug would be a huge benefit because it bumps into things in close quarters which is distracting, and I can't wear a beanie over my hears. The latter is my biggest issue, we're in the actually cold part of winter out here on the Washington coast and I have to work outside in the rain and sleet a lot, and my ears are getting cold. My other con is that the wire is super stiff, which makes it a little hard to route so that it stays out of the way and won't get snagged. If I were to give feedback to Elgin, I would say to add a bend to the plug end and use a more flexible cord coating like a braided sheath, you could probably lose the nice storage case to keep the cost similar to what it is. Several guys I work with also bought these, and since we have personal radios we don't have much need for the storage because they stay plugged into our hand sets while they're charging. UPDATE I bought 2 pairs so I'd have a backup. The first pair finally died, the speaker blew out. I switched over to my spare and out of the box it has a weird issue. The sound is clear and clean, but when someone else is on the radio it will start at full volume and then very quickly fade out to almost no volume, this is a QC issue so I'm not too upset and have ordered another pair. The first pair pasting almost 3 months of hard use combined with the price still makes these a good buy for me, even if there is an occasional QC miss. Read more