Attenuation of hearing protectors for pure-tones and 13-octave bands of noise

Eleven hearing protectors were tested according to the Argentinian Standard (IRAM 4060) with pure tones and random noise filtered in 1/3-octave bands as the test stimuli. Although the differences between the standard deviations are not statistically significant, there are significant differences between mean values for the two types of test signal. This indicates that a re-examination of the standard method is required.