You bought the earplugs. You tried a white noise app. You still hear the thump through the wall at 1 AM, and you have started to wonder whether you are just unusually sensitive. You are not. The noise that wakes you is bass, and bass is the one thing earplugs and white noise are both worst at. That is physics rather than bad luck, and once you understand why, the fix becomes obvious.

Why Earplugs Struggle With Bass

Notice what you actually hear through the wall. You get the bassline but not the melody. Footsteps overhead but not the conversation. The rumble of a television but not the dialogue. That pattern is the whole story.

Earplugs are better at high frequencies than low ones. Foam plugs typically cut high-pitched sound by around 40 decibels but bass by only about 20, and less again when they are not pushed in deep enough, which is common. So they take out more of the treble that was not bothering you than the thump that was.

There is also a ceiling no plug can get past. At low frequencies some sound reaches your inner ear through the bones of your head rather than the ear canal, so no earplug, however well fitted, blocks everything.

If earplugs were also uncomfortable, you were fighting for a benefit that was never going to arrive. (If you still use them for other noise, here is how to keep nightly use safe: is it bad to sleep with earplugs?) Related, if the noise is coming from beside you rather than through a wall: how to block out snoring without earplugs.

Why Bass Gets Through Walls

Three things work against you at the same time.

  • Long waves bend around things. Low frequencies diffract, so they curve around edges and slip through gaps that stop higher frequencies. Sealing a door helps far more with voices than with bass.
  • They lose less energy in solids. A bass wave passes through a wall giving up much less of itself than a treble wave does, so more of it arrives on your side.
  • They set the wall vibrating. This is the important one. Low frequencies make the structure itself resonate, which means the wall stops being a barrier and starts behaving like a large, slow speaker pointed at your bed.

That last point is why most soundproofing advice underdelivers. Rugs, curtains, and foam panels change how sound reflects inside your room. They do very little about sound arriving through the structure, and structure is how bass gets to you.

Why White Noise Also Fails

Masking is not about volume. It works when the sound you add carries energy in roughly the same frequency range as the sound you are trying to cover. Match the range and the intruding noise stops standing out. Miss the range and you have simply added a second noise.

White noise carries equal energy at every frequency, which in practice means most of what you perceive sits in the upper register. It is genuinely excellent against a slamming door, a siren, a voice in the corridor, or a dog. Against a 60 Hz thump coming through a party wall, it has almost nothing in the right place.

So you turn it up. Now you have a loud hiss and an audible thump, and the room is worse than when you started.

Brown noise is the answer. Its energy is weighted heavily toward the low end, which puts it in the same range as the noise actually reaching you. It sounds less like static and more like distant surf or a heavy rain, and against bass it does the job white noise cannot. The full comparison is here: brown noise vs white noise vs pink noise.

What Actually Works

  • Match the frequency, not the volume. Brown noise against bass, white or pink against voices and sudden high sounds. If you take one thing from this page, take this.
  • Start it before you get into bed. Not after the noise begins. A sound that was already playing when you lay down becomes part of the background. A sound you switch on in irritation at midnight is one more new thing for your brain to track.
  • Run it all night. A 30 minute timer suits someone whose only problem is falling asleep. Your neighbours keep their own schedule, and the 3 AM door slam is the one that costs you the most.
  • Get the source close to your ear. This matters more than people expect. A speaker across the room has to out-compete the noise everywhere in the room. A source at your ear only has to out-compete it at your ear, which it can do at a far lower volume.
  • Move the bed off the shared wall. Free, and it works, because both airborne and structure-borne sound weaken with distance from the source. If the noise comes from the street rather than the building, the window matters more than the wall: how to sleep with traffic noise.
  • Away from home, the same logic applies. Hotel corridors and lifts are the travelling version of this problem, with one extra twist: why you can't sleep in hotels.
  • Be realistic about soft furnishings. Rugs and heavy curtains are worth having, but they treat reflections inside your room. They will not stop bass arriving through the building.
  • A fan is a blunt version of this. It masks broadband noise reasonably well and does nothing for bass, and it dries your eyes while it works: is it bad to sleep with a fan on?
  • Do not write off earplugs. Pushed in properly, foam plugs still cut bass by around 20 decibels, and in a 2026 sleep lab study they protected sleep from aircraft noise better than pink noise did. For loud, intermittent noise they deserve a proper try: is white noise bad for you?
  • Talk to your neighbour first. Genuinely the highest-return move available, it costs nothing, and people are often unaware. If that fails, your landlord, building manager, or local council is the route. Masking makes the nights survivable, but it is not a remedy for a real nuisance.

How Lullabar Fits

Most sleep audio is built for the wrong half of the spectrum. The Lullabar happens to be built for this one.

  • 40mm driver. This is the spec that matters here. Small drivers cannot move enough air to reproduce low frequencies with any body, so they render brown noise thin and hissy, which is exactly the failure you are trying to avoid. A larger driver keeps the low end full at low volume.
  • 11 built-in sounds and micro-SD. Nature sounds built in, or load your own onto a card, with no phone in the bed.
  • 10+ hours of battery. Covers the whole night at normal volume rather than stopping at minute 30, on roughly a 2 hour charge over USB-C.
  • It sits under your pillow. Centimetres from your ear, so the masking works at a volume that would be useless from a nightstand. This is the point most people miss about room speakers.
  • At sleep volume, your partner hears nothing. Only your pillow carries it. You do not have to fill a shared bedroom with brown noise all night to fix your own problem.
  • 11mm thick, 47.5 g. Bluetooth 5.4, pairs once. IPX4.

The honest limit: this is masking, not soundproofing. Nothing under your pillow reduces the sound entering your flat. A genuinely loud party through a thin wall will still come through, and at high levels structure-borne bass beats anything you can play against it. What masking does is raise the floor so the ordinary version of your problem, the television, the footsteps, the late music, stops pulling you out of sleep.

How sound through a pillow differs from sound in a room: what pillow conduction audio actually is.

Common Questions

"Why don't earplugs block my neighbour's bass?"

They do block some of it, just less than you might expect. Foam earplugs typically cut bass by about 20 decibels, around half what they manage at high pitches, and less again if they are not fitted deeply. Some low-frequency sound also reaches your inner ear through your head rather than the ear canal. So the thump is the part most likely to get through.

"What is the best sound to mask neighbour noise?"

Match the sound to the noise. Brown noise for thumping bass, music through a wall, or footsteps overhead. White or pink noise for voices, doors, sirens, and other higher-frequency sounds. Most people default to white noise for everything, which is why masking so often seems not to work.

"Does white noise block bass?"

Barely. White noise spreads its energy evenly across all frequencies, so perceptually most of it lands in the higher register, well away from where bass sits. Turning it up adds hiss without covering the thump. Brown noise, weighted to the low end, is the right tool.

"Should I run masking all night or use a timer?"

All night, if the noise is not on your schedule. A timer is fine when your only difficulty is dropping off. Neighbour noise arrives whenever it arrives, and the wake-ups after 2 AM are the expensive ones because getting back to sleep is harder then.

"Will soundproofing my bedroom help?"

Partly, and less than the DIY guides suggest. Rugs, curtains, and panels change how sound behaves inside your room, which helps with echo and with higher frequencies leaking through gaps. Bass mostly arrives by making the building's structure vibrate, and soft furnishings do not touch that. Sealing gaps and moving your bed away from the shared wall are the two cheap moves worth making.

The Bottom Line

If earplugs and white noise both let you down, you were not doing it wrong. Both are at their weakest in exactly the range where bass lives, which is the most common mismatch in this whole category.

Switch to brown noise, start it before you lie down, keep it running through the night, and put the source close enough to your ear that it can stay quiet. Then have the awkward conversation with your neighbour anyway, because that is still the fix with the highest return. And if you are sleeping while they are legitimately going about their day, the problem is a different one: how to sleep during the day.

Try the Lullabar for 30 nights and let the wall be somebody else's problem.