Have you ever used good, custom-fit earplugs? You don't say but if you are in an amateur band maybe you haven't used comfortable custom-molded sound protection.
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A couple of beginner's IEM questions
- Thread starter PatTheDog
- Start date
Have you ever used good, custom-fit earplugs? You don't say but if you are in an amateur band maybe you haven't used comfortable custom-molded sound protection.
I had a band where nothing but vocals were on mic. I brought a small mixer, put one clip on mic on the drums, and a 57 hanging on the guitar amp. I ran a line out from the PA for vocals. My bass went direct.
I used my Xvive wireless IEM and it worked great to be able to mix the show in ears.
Kind of a pain to setup, but it was one extra bag that could hold everything.
Good IEM buds can block out a lot of sound, so you may end up having to unseat them from your canal which can reduce the volume for you.
I used my Xvive wireless IEM and it worked great to be able to mix the show in ears.
Kind of a pain to setup, but it was one extra bag that could hold everything.
Good IEM buds can block out a lot of sound, so you may end up having to unseat them from your canal which can reduce the volume for you.
Not necessarily.
You can get the MX2 PRO from MEE for $100.
Then if you go and get impressions of your ears made on your own and send them in, you can get ear tips made for them for $150.
I have the MX3 PRO (which are $150 not $100). So all I spent was $300 plus the cost of getting the impressions made. I called around And I think I only paid $50. So custom fit IEM for $350 all in, and I think it sounds great. Can’t beat that.
Thanks, some good food for thought here. I'm now questioning the wisdom of relying on ambient leakage, and adding a mixer / mic sounds like too much faff.
I'm going to look into ways to get the amp raised a lot closer to ear level - there's an Ortega stand that goes up to 62cm which should be more effective than my tilt wedge. And from there maybe look into some custom earplugs to replace my off-the-shelf ones.
I'm going to look into ways to get the amp raised a lot closer to ear level - there's an Ortega stand that goes up to 62cm which should be more effective than my tilt wedge. And from there maybe look into some custom earplugs to replace my off-the-shelf ones.
Decibullz are at home custom molded plugs. Basically you take the plug, put it in boiling water for x amount of time, take them out of the water and put into your ear, let them set and then take them out. Some people love them, some people hate them. They make "musicians" plugs too, but they're slightly worse rated. The good thing about them is if you screw them up, you just throw them back in the water and remold them.
Radians also makes a decent at home set.
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Seriously, I've packed up and left after a couple tunes, before. It depends, of course. And I ALWAYS keep ear plugs in every instrument case, so the first sign of this kind of behavior and in go the plugs. If they don't care enough about their music to play at sensible volumes, I don't care enough to bother with whether I can hear myself. In extreme situations I've been known to pull out the bright red shooting muffs.
As I'm sure you know, hearing damage depends on the combination of intensity of exposure and time of exposure. (Basically, you can imagine that every minute of exposure to loud noise breaks off a few more little hair cells; the louder it is, the faster they're getting damaged, the longer it is, the more are getting damaged.) I have also read and understood that our perception of whether noise is loud enough to do damage is not accurate; we may THINK that the exposure isn't damaging when it is.
All of this has a lot to do with why I am no longer interested in playing rock and roll. It's just too exhausting trying to deal with excessive sound levels. Rock and roll, especially, has a lot of LOUD just built into its genes. But I've done things like rehearsing with a 16 piece big band in a basement room with all hard surfaces - IN go the ear plugs!
I am only going to have one set of ears. Hearing aids are NOT a direct drop-in replacement. No one I know who uses hearing aids says they're better than the original ears.
s0c9
Supporting Member
While I don’t disagree on the premise, those are NOT really customs.
Much like building a bass from pieces parts. End result functions the same, but…
I’ve done that- way back - in the past with a set of Weston’s UM1’s.
Didn’t work too well and that drove me to customs. That and small ear canals.
YMMV
As we’ve often discussed before, it’s not that simple
The Linsoul earbuds that @PatTheDog is referring to use dynamic drivers (ie what we think of when we think of a ‘speaker’, with magnets, a voice coil, cone etc), which are capable of efficiently reproducing a wide frequency range, NOT balanced armature (BA) drivers, which are only capable of efficiently reproducing a much more limited frequency range. Generally speaking, the greater the number of BAs, the fewer compromises need to be made in frequency response, with lower driver counts missing out on representing some parts of the audio spectrum. Earbuds using BAs need more drivers in order to cover a wide frequency range (it is not for audio separation or for ear fatigue, though the audio clarity a good pair provides would help with both of these). On the other hand, a suitably designed dynamic driver earbud could happily cover all the frequencies that you might want in an IEM - just like you may find (for example) single driver bookshelf speakers or monitors of excellent audio fidelity (usually for a price).
This is not to say that any particular single dynamic earbud isn’t going to be overpriced rubbish (Shure se215, I’m looking at you), and I have no idea whether the Linsoul one does or not as I have no experience with it, but it is not inherently limited just because it has a single driver.
Regarding the ability to adjust certain frequencies without impacting others - I would love to see some citations for that, as I really don’t see how that works given that you don’t have access to adjust the crossover in the earbuds. Both dynamics and BAs just work with whatever signal is coming in and do their best to reproduce it. I have never heard anyone say that a typical 10” driver has any trouble with frequencies being cut or boosted affecting other parts of the audio spectrum in a way that doesn’t track with what’s going on in whatever EQ device is being used.
A while back I picked up a couple of Shure SCM262's off Reverb for almost nothing. It's a 1U 1/2 rack width mixer, probably about the size if the TC BAM200 amp. I think they were designed for use in restaurants with jukeboxes and overhead paging systems (has ducking options and 12V phantom power). I rack mounted one of them with my IEM rig and the other is available for gigs where I want IEM's but there aren't a lot of standard options available for me. I find it especially useful for big band gigs with lots of horns. I can just plug into one of the monitor sends for horns, vocals, and piano, and use another channel for my bass. I can also run an ambient omni condenser mic up front, which was another great score I found on the used market. It's a super compact setup that fits in my gig bag (mostly) and only takes a couple of minutes to set up.
I've been using these for a couple years on a mostly silent stage at church. I think they are a great option, but buying memory foam tips would be a must in this situation. That will be necessary for noise isolation and also may help the bass response as they are pretty neutral sounding stock,. Access to eq will help boost that if you need. Truthear Gate and 7hz Zero:2 will have more bass from a stock tuning, depending on your preference. I may be in a minority that doesn't prefer a lot of built in bass for monitoring. For music listening though, extra bass from the zero:2 is perfect for me. audiosciencereview has some good info on these options.
I think this is better route.
You could have gotten Behringer P2 and KZ IEMs, and just used amp send for signal. KZ would bring partial seal and remove some of that stage noise, while replacing it with your signal. But chances are that wouldn't work - maybe you would turn Behringer volume too high to compensate noise and damage your hearing or make a mistake of removing one IEM to split signals left and right (also bad for hearing).
To give someone on this forum best advice, only way is to recommend tried and tested industry-standard solution. And that is to get signal from mixer and use it as the only source and block any ambient sound (noise) out.
So, back to your new idea, change your setup so you can hear yourself better (aiming cab at your head, or bring second one can put it on top of first one). Then get couple of noise-reduction ear plugs of different values (like -10db, -20db, -30db) and test which one works best at protecting your hearing but still allowing you to hear what you need to.
I would also second the option of using custom mold musician earplugs if that's not what you tried. I used mine for years in a loud band as well as every concert since I've had them and it helped a lot. They were around $200 canadian money from a local audiologist.
