Knots you can use the cheap 10.00 carbon back blades 1/2" 3 or 4 teeth per inch and resaw fine. I resaw tropical hardwoods as well as osage and domestic white woods with mine. Their is a little trick about adjusting the drift on your saw that makes the cuts go much faster. First of all set your saw up properly, most important you want the blade tracking in the very center of the top wheel. Adjust your tension and guies and bearings, plenty of online set up tutorials.
The secret to fast resawing is take a ruler and hold it against the edge of your board and then draw a straight paralell line the length of your board on the inside edge of the ruller about 1" in from the edge of the board. Now carefully feed the board through your saw with no fence cutting straight down your line, adjust the feed angle on your board until it feeds straight through without you moving the back. You may find it is between 1/8" and 1/2" out of square with your fence. This is fine, install a board on your fence at the exact same angle you had to feed the board through at for a straight cut. You will see a remarkable improvement.
Thanks for the advice Steve. I do have the drift angle compensated for using a wooden fence clamped onto my actual fence at the angle of the current blade, using some thin wooden wedges to get it just right. I think these woodslicer blades just go dull on me really fast. They do cut nice and fast at first, but then after just a little bit it starts to take forever to make a cut. I am only resawing about 1 1/2" high.
The less teeth the better . The blade needs the bigger gullets to get rid of the sawdust on thicker cuts.
If your blade is way out of square , you need to adjust the tilt on the top wheel to get the blade tracking in the center of the rubber.Then adj. the back bearings out so they almost touch the back of the blade. The blades I buy are less than 20 bucks. If you are cutting staves there is always the risk of it twisting and kinking or braking the blade. I don't think there has been enough curse words invented yet for me to do that to a 40 dollar blade 
. If you try racing through a cut you wont get the chip clearance neccesary for a good cut.
For hearing protection, you can double up. Ear plugs with ear muffs over top. Makes a big difference. I do this sometimes when I'm planing real hard lumber.
Currently, I have been using some ear muffs rated at 25 decibels, and some of those foam ear plugs. The ear plugs suck though, they keep popping out of my ears. Even if they don't though, it doesn't seem to be enough. My ears (and head) will still hurt, and I will still have temporary hearing loss to a degree. Everything will sound kind of muffled for a day or two, I notice it mostly when having to turn the tv up, or playing guitar and it just isn't enjoyable to play because it sounds muffled, like I am playing with ear muffs on, but I don't have any on. The last thing I wanna do, as a guitar player, is to go partially deaf. I have read that over a certain decibel, like 30 or something like that, that sound is transferred mostly through the bones in your skull instead of the ear canal. I tried putting on a skull cap and then the ear muffs, (with the ear plugs underneath) and it actually worked pretty good, even though the ear muffs didn't have a great seal of course. I'll buy another better skull cap, double up, and see if that helps. It wouldn't be that big of a problem I would think, if it didn't take darn near 10 minutes or longer to make one cut, or if I had a garage with the door open where the sound wasn't bounced right off the concrete wall, etc.
