DownBeats are the best soft sound attenuators I've used.
I need ear plugs of some kind for a number of reasons. I have extremely sensitive hearing and tend to get uncomfortable adrenalin surges when loud and sudden noises occur. I also like to attend concerts from music types from orchestral traditional music to jazz/fusion to all-out metal rock music.<br /><br />In the work I do (IT, office-based business), I am called to conference rooms for meetings several times a day. Inevitably, someone on the conference speaks mouse-quiet and someone has the microphone permanently embedded in their teeth so that not only are they louder than anyone, we get treated to breathing and mouth noises for an hour at a time. Also, inevitably, the person running the call has the speaker/speakerphone turned up to its maximum volume. With some folks, this isn’t a bad thing. With most, however, it’s really grueling to have remote callers screaming at you at 125 or more decibels for long periods of time. This is the PERFECT time for the DownBeats ear plugs. They fit my small-medium ear channels, and they aren’t grossly obvious to my colleagues. This is a life saver for me: it really is excruciating when a caller is screaming at me through low-fi speakers in the room for what seems like a lifetime.<br /><br />Some have asked about the color of the stems. My family has four sets of DownBeats, and all of them have clear stems. It might be a manufacturing batch or maybe a supply difference that causes some to have white stems. None of ours have white stems and hide very nicely in our ear channels.<br /><br />When I go to concerts, the DownBeats aren’t quite as attenuating as I would like. They work great and are very unobtrusive to my ears (as in, how they feel in my ears) and are unobtrusive to the sound quality, save a little shaving off of the high trebles and a bit of the mids. For me (this is a personal thing), I would like for them to attenuate a little more when I am at a loud concert. When the sound technician is attempting to produce the current show as if she/he was engineering The Who in the 70s, I find the DownBeats lacking a bit. At a recent Pat Metheny concert, I couldn’t have been happier: the Carolina Theater in Durham had the balance, EQ, and volume just right (and besides, Path Metheny and his folks understand a little –used thing called dynamics).<br /><br />To give you an idea of the flexibility of the fit of DownBeats, I can use an Apple ear phone reference to help you: my ears channels are small to medium. Apple EarPods and ear buds don’t fit in my ear. I’ve never been able to use them because they don’t even slightly fit in my ear channels. My wife, on the other hand, has much larger ear channels and comfortably wears both Apple EarPods and the older ear buds. Here’s the punchline: The DownBeats fit both our ear channels just fine. They are flexible and soft enough to really do the trick.<br /><br />One more thing about comfort… They’re very shallow. I have deep ear pockets and my wife has shallow ear pockets. In my case, I have learned how to grip the DownBeats by their stems and push them in my ear channels in just the right way. It takes a moment to get them settled in or get them out, but in neither case is it hard to do. In addition, I can wear them for a few hours at a time without having ear-compression issues or ear-contact sounds that are irritating. With my wife, the DownBeats are really easy to pop in or out, as her smaller fingers and larger ear pockets give her more room to get the DownBeats just right.<br /><br />Overall, I’m very happy with them. We have a couple of pairs in her purse and one on my keychain. I also have a set at work I keep on my badge for ready use for those lovely multi-continent dial-in meetings.<br /><br />The DownBeats beat the pink foam ear inserts for me at concerts because DownBeats don't kill the best parts of the sound spectrum - although pink foam inserts to make loud concerts quieter.
Rating: 5 stars