New ISO standards for hearing protectors (A)

Working Group 17 under ISO/TC43/SC1 deals with measurement of hearing protector attenuation. WG17 is presently involved in revision of the present 4869-1 standard (especially sound field requirements and reproducibility estimations) and formulation of a new standard where inexperienced hearing protector users are mandatory as test subjects.

The latter procedure has recently been introduced in the USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Both the present and the new standard use the Real Ear At Threshold (REAT) method. Results from investigations of the sound field in different test environments will be presented and the status of coming standards for impulse noise and for devices with active noise control will be mentioned.