Taming the Vulfpeck

This ↑ is what happens when Joe Dart breaks the sound barrier playing “Dean Town”. (And not when i drop my phone on a 2,000-year-old theatre’s stone steps trying to put it in my pocket — my back pocket.) Vulfpeck’s concert at the Jazz à Vienne festival was the best non-jazz concert i’ve ever been to, but also one of the loudest. Which is to say: it was the perfect venue to test out new earplugs. Believe it or not, foam plugs like the good old 3M E-A-R Classics are the gold standard, as they can provide a 30 to 50 dB noise reduction. But they only work if you insert them properly, and they destroy sound quality, cutting the highs to the point of making everything dull and lifeless. They’re a godsend when you need to work or sleep in a noisy environment, but when it comes to music, there are far better solutions — earplugs with acoustic filters. Instead of packing your ear canal with foam to block as much noise as possible, they force sound to pass through a carefully tuned chamber…