Etymotic ER 20 High Fidelity Ear Plugs
I had an appointment with my audiologist this week. He checked my hearing and gave me a pair of ER 20 ear plugs from Etymotic Research.
I got a chance to test out the etymotic plugs and they are a revelation. I put them in as the audiologist instructed, and went to the basement to play my DW drumkit, which is sitting in a far corner with cement block on two walls and the concrete floor with my drum rug beneath the kit, basically a very live room with too much high end and no bottom end.
The effect of the etymotic, from my experience, is best described as listening to the kit through a Shure SM57 mic, which is a good thing (TM). Very different from the gun plugs - these are very musical. What I noticed most readily, and the reason that the SM57 has been used to record everything from vocals to instruments on most major records for almost 50 years, is that there is a darkening of the sound, rolling off the highs, but again in a very musical way.
In particular the cymbals have that very dark, old istanbul sound, which they should, mine are jazz pies, so they're designed to sound that way, but what we know on the records typically came through an old SM57 and that's why we remember it with this tone. They actually don't sound like that in real life even though we've spent 30 years trying to engineer them to sound as if the SM57 filter were built into the cymbal. Laughs.
The sound through the ER 20's is very nice, arguably what I'd expect from an in-ear monitor. I'm going to wear these tomorrow and see how that goes. My biggest concern is that they would fall out while I'm playing and get lost. That and the comfort factor would be my only reasons for considering the custom molds.
Also, I think the 20db attenuation is just right though I'll wait till the full band is blowing to make that judgment. Based on hammering away at my drumkit, the 15 would be not enough and the 25 too much. With these, I could still hear the ghost notes at the softest dynamics and that's what matters. The only downside I noticed is that a rim click or sidestick on the snare drum seemed to lose its body, but that's a minor nit given what you gain and may have more to do with my flyweight 7a sticks than anything else.
I got a chance to test out the etymotic plugs and they are a revelation. I put them in as the audiologist instructed, and went to the basement to play my DW drumkit, which is sitting in a far corner with cement block on two walls and the concrete floor with my drum rug beneath the kit, basically a very live room with too much high end and no bottom end.
The effect of the etymotic, from my experience, is best described as listening to the kit through a Shure SM57 mic, which is a good thing (TM). Very different from the gun plugs - these are very musical. What I noticed most readily, and the reason that the SM57 has been used to record everything from vocals to instruments on most major records for almost 50 years, is that there is a darkening of the sound, rolling off the highs, but again in a very musical way.
In particular the cymbals have that very dark, old istanbul sound, which they should, mine are jazz pies, so they're designed to sound that way, but what we know on the records typically came through an old SM57 and that's why we remember it with this tone. They actually don't sound like that in real life even though we've spent 30 years trying to engineer them to sound as if the SM57 filter were built into the cymbal. Laughs.
The sound through the ER 20's is very nice, arguably what I'd expect from an in-ear monitor. I'm going to wear these tomorrow and see how that goes. My biggest concern is that they would fall out while I'm playing and get lost. That and the comfort factor would be my only reasons for considering the custom molds.
Also, I think the 20db attenuation is just right though I'll wait till the full band is blowing to make that judgment. Based on hammering away at my drumkit, the 15 would be not enough and the 25 too much. With these, I could still hear the ghost notes at the softest dynamics and that's what matters. The only downside I noticed is that a rim click or sidestick on the snare drum seemed to lose its body, but that's a minor nit given what you gain and may have more to do with my flyweight 7a sticks than anything else.
posted by David Watson at
11:01 AM
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