The IEM (in ear monitors) Bible thread - a guide to help every musician

[wateroftyne]

2 hours ago, EBS_freak said:

Getting a good fit was always the problem with me - hence why I went down the custom route.

I may get some moulded tips for the Plunges at some point. I'd always welcome a bit more attentuation.

[SimonK]

2 hours ago, TimR said:

 

Interesting fact. Everyone's ear canals are different lengths and shapes (that should not come as a surprise) which means everyone hears things differently to everyone else. If you swapped your ears for someone else's, your brain would really struggle to understand what it was hearing.

 

The same is true for eyes. What one person's eyes present to the brain as red is different to what someone else's do. 

 

Which is OK, because we calibrate our ears so that an F# is an F# no matter who you are. It does mean that one resonant frequency for one person would be different for someone else. 

 

Philosophers call this "Qualia" which is losely defined as the "what it is like" of experiencing something. The kicker is that we can never know what it is like to experience something from someone else's perspective, and thus the best we have is indirect evidence from others who act/report the same sort of things as we do for a given experience/stimuli. There's also the fact that while not identical, our biology is close enough to other's to infer that what I experience as the colour "red" is most likely pretty similar to what you experience, but we can never know for sure.

 

Probably the most famous discussion on this is Thomas Nagels' "What is it like to be a bat".

 

But this is high falutin philosophy, with IEMs it probably is just minor differences in ear shape!!