Ear muffs with a microphone and speaker can be turned up loudly, overcoming a fair amount of ear plug noise resistance, while still blocking loud sounds.
You still have redundancy for your gun, yet, you can still hear you friend talking normally, but still muted, a bit.
This does work well - the only real issue is getting used to squirrels forty yards away in dry leaves, that sound like mutant elephants charging down on you.
That passes after a few “WTF!”’s...