Minuendo Music Earplugs — A Mix Real-World Review

New York, NY (November 25, 2024)—Earplugs are a crucial tool for audio pros, whether you work in live sound at cranked-up concerts, or in a studio where clients monitor louder than you’d like. In the past, you might’ve gotten smirked at for taking care of your ears, but with the industry’s increasing focus on self care, it’s far more socially and professionally acceptable to pop in some earplugs—which is a great thing.

That said, generic foam earplugs are hard for pros to work with because they are one-size-fits-all—not only in terms of physical fit, but also the amount of sound they reduce. Most off-the-shelf plugs block a fixed level between 22 and 32 dB, which usually is too high when you still need to accurately know what your surroundings sound like. If you’re in a dynamic environment, you’re forever putting plugs in and pulling them out, until eventually they get stuffed in a pocket where they aren’t protecting your hearing at all.

Enter Minuendo Music—high-end earplugs that can be manually adjusted on the fly to variably reduce sound. Each plug has a small lever that opens and closes an acoustic membrane inside the plug itself, letting you tweak the sound level as needed. At their lowest setting, the Minuendo Music plugs decrease levels by 7 dB, but with a slide of the lever, you can reduce as much as 25 dB. There’s no batteries involved, no tools and best of all, no need to remove a plug from your ear to adjust it.

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Minuendo Music plugs come with 11 sets of small, medium and large ear tips, giving you plenty of options. There’s also a cleaning brush, neck leash, user guide and a carrying case. In a nice design touch, the ear plugs themselves are magnetic so they can snap together—useful when they’re on the neck leash so they aren’t swinging around.

Put to the test, the Minuendo Music plugs easily handled a loud concert at Madison Square Garden; it was like having a volume knob for my surroundings. Standing at front-of-house, I had the levers midway for most of the show and could hear details and high-end with airiness despite what was a -15 to -20 dB reduction. Then, ducking out into the quieter concourse, a flip of the levers opened up the acoustic membrane and I could hear my surroundings without having to remove the plugs. Did they sound like I was wearing earplugs? Somewhat—whether you could wear them and perform analytic audio work is a matter of personal taste, but they were very tweakable and I felt like I heard the show as the FOH engineer intended. For non-critical listening, they were a home run.

That said, Minuendo Music earplugs are not cheap, running $179 (there’s also a fixed -17 dB version, Minuendo Live, for $99). My only quibble is that I wish the levers were detented in steps to indicate specifically how much you’re reducing the sound levels, but admittedly, that would make them less fine-tunable. Regardless, Minuendo Music earplugs are a solid win; being able to variably reduce levels in an earplug is a game changer.