In 2010, the American writer and essayist George Michelsen Foy wrote Zero Decibels, about his search for the world’s quietest places. He travelled to the Parisian catacombs, a nickel mine in Canada, and into a Minnesota laboratory’s anechoic chamber, where the silence is supposed to be unbearable. Michelsen-Foy’s quest was driven by his desperation to block out the noise around him. I’m not there yet, but I do notice – and react to – noise a lot more than I did earlier. I flee noisy restaurants or bars, flinch when a car horn literally stabs me in the back when I’m walking the dog, and, as you can see, here I am, writing about objects that promise to smother the cacophony around us.
Looping in
The object in question is a pair of fancy earplugs called Loop, which launched in India in September this year. Loop was founded in 2016 in Antwerp by Martin Bodewes and Dimitri O. Its founders, besides sharing a passion for nightlife, were also fellow tinnitus sufferers.
Loop initially targeted concert- and festival-goers, but in the years since Covid, it has expanded into offering products that are designed to help people focus, sleep deeper, and work and travel better. Loop has been a social media sensation and is especially popular with Gen Z and younger Millennials. In 2023, it clocked €126 million in revenue and sells over 5 million pairs annually. This year, it featured in American business magazine Fast Company’s list of 2024 Innovators.
In India, Loop sells eight different kinds of earplugs, from Dream, which claims to enhance the quality of your sleep; Quiet 2, which aids deep focus; and Switch 2, which allows you to cycle through three different modes. An average pair of foam earplugs costs about 100 bucks, so why does Loop charge anywhere between ₹1,800 and ₹5,000 for its earplugs?
Less loud but clear
According to the US-based National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, long or repeated exposure to sounds at or above 85 dBA (the dBA scale is based on the intensity of the sound and how the human ear perceives it) can cause hearing loss, besides significantly impacting our health. A normal conversation is around 60-70 dBA; a cricket match at a stadium would be about 110 dBA; sirens from emergency vehicles anywhere between 110 and 129dBA, and a street in Mumbai would probably be, I don’t know, 500 dBA?
Loop says it doesn’t block sound like a typical pair of earplugs attempt to do. Instead, it filters it, which makes music and speech clear, but less loud. Sound waves, which enter the earplugs through a small opening, travel through a hollow channel, which is the same length as your ear canal. According to Loop, by imitating the function of your ear canal, the earplugs ensure natural sound that isn’t muffled. An acoustic filter placed at the end of the channel lowers all frequencies equally.
Loop also looks nothing like most regular earplugs. It is shaped like a, well, loop, that is made of either plastic or silicone, with a replaceable, reusable, and washable silicone ear tip attached to a short stem (the acoustic channel). The elegant, almost discreet earplugs nestle securely in your ear, and the nifty, circular carry case can often be a conversation-starter. Loop offers several levels of noise reduction, which is measured in dB signal-to-ratio (SNR). These range from the Quiet 2, which offers up to 24 dB (SNR) of noise reduction, to the Engage 2, which filters background noise by 16 dB (SNR), and which was the model I used for the purposes of this article.
Loop Engage 2 vs Big City
A month with the Engage 2 opened my ears, if you will, to a kind of nagging soundtrack to my life that I had barely noticed all this while. The racket the ceiling fan in the bedroom makes, for instance; the tech-charged hum of domesticity around mid-morning; and the distressingly huge range of sounds that can emanate from a modern-day flat-plan office. The Engage 2 tamps each of these down. Expectedly, while it was no match for the din that Mumbai makes, it managed to dull ambient noise – at the metro, in the cab – to make it a bit more tolerable. At restaurants, I was only too glad to hear the conversation around my own table, and the earplugs were especially a revelation at airports, which can be annoyingly noisy places. I also found them way easier on the ears than any kind of earphones, and hope that they get better at reducing the occlusion effect (the feeling of hearing your own voice all boomy while wearing earplugs). If you think you want to shut the door on the world every once in a while, I’d heartily recommend these. They might be priced at a premium, but the privilege of (relative) silence in an increasingly noisy world doesn’t come cheap.
