California-based tactical communications producer Silynx Communications, for which situational awareness and hearing protection specialist Octave10 is the sole South African provider, offers a cost-effective and improved solution to enable effective communication in noisy environments, such as riots.

By using the Silynx Clarus FX2 smart tactical headset system, operators enjoy clear hearing and radio communications even in a significantly noisy environment.

The Clarus earbuds’ light weight and ergonomic design, allows comfortable wear, constant sound protection from noise and, most importantly, “talking from the ear” technology that allows independent, isolated, quality and clear speech – independently to the user head gear, allowing the use of any helmet type, gas mask or respirator, for example.

The Clarus FX2 smart tactical headset system uses ear buds designed to reduce the wearer’s physical burden as it does not apply pressure on the head, weighs 10 g and leaves the ear ventilated – avoiding sweat and heat accumulation.

At the heart of the Silynx solution is its In-Ear sound protection headset technology with In-Ear proprietary speech microphone. This technological leap was made possible only by developments in electronics miniaturisation technologies.

Silynx In-Ear headsets work similarly to the over-the-ear (OTE) headsets. In each earbud an external environmental microphone is embedded. A miniaturised speaker in the earbud feeds the ear with the environmental audio input after being electronically processed to reduce harmful high-energy noise input so that the user can hear the environment while harmful loud noise such as shooting or crowd shouting is reduced to a safe hearing level.

The sound reduction circuitry is a high-speed respond system that identifies and compresses any high energy external sound collected from the environment, into safe energy level audio that is transmitted into the user’s ear through the headset speaker.

As with other advanced OTE headsets, the Silynx In-Ear headsets also provide “Hear Thru” technology – allowing the user to increase or decrease the environmental hearing sensitivity.

Unlike OTE headsets, the Clarus system ventilates the ear and prevents ear sweating while retaining natural directional hearing, as the user’s pinna (auricle) is not covered.

While OTE headsets use an external “boom” microphone to transmit speech, the Silynx In-Ear headsets use a proprietary In-Ear nano microphone, which picks up minute internal in-ear air movement created during speech and converts it into audio signal.

This technology has a lot of advantages over older bone conduction, “talking from the ear” technology, which requires unpleasant constant pressure on the tragus bone and precise location of the earbuds, and preforms badly at low tone speaking (whispering).

Silynx ear buds are light and comfortable to allow continuous use. They are inserted in acoustic foam earbuds tips and placed in the ear as with regular foam earbuds. Once placed in the ear, the earbuds provide the best passive sound protection in the industry with a noise reduction rating (the standard for hearing protection attenuation across North America) of 30 or a single number rating (European Union standard) of 36.