High Fidelity Ear Plugs for Hearing Protection - Discreet, Clear Ear Plugs for Concerts, Festivals & Noisy Events - Up to 18dB Background Noise Reduction Rave Earplugs - Comes with Aluminum Case

I have sensory issues and I’m looking more for something to help me when my kids are getting loud so that I can still hear them when I’m getting anxious. These are extremely comfortable! So much better than the traditional earplugs, reduces, just the right amount of noise, perfect value for the money because of the carrying case is so helpful. I thought the design was a little weird at first but super cool and works really great.

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.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.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.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).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.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.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.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.

I love music. And as one of my favorite music professors always says, live music is always better than dead music.Just in the past year and a half, I've really started getting into the live concert scene. Let me rephrase that, I've started getting into the live rock concert scene. I've always been a frequent attendee of wind ensemble and orchestra concerts.I've also always have had a mild case of tinnitus, or ringing in the ears. This ringing is evidence of hearing damage, and it irreversible.Needless to say, going to rock concerts without hearing protection left me with a few nights of extra-ringing ears, and almost certainly hearing damage as well.More recently, I've actually been experiencing perforations of my ear drum and even just this year a full burst. Because of all of this, I decided to get my hands on a pair of ear plugs.The problem for me is that I can't just wear any old foam earplugs. I'm a bit of an audiophile, and those regular earplugs just make everything sound muffled, which for me defeats a lot of the purpose of going to a live show in the first place.That's where the downbeats come in. They are a special type of ear plug that lets most of the sound profile in, but cuts the volume to a safe level (they advertise 18dB noise reduction).Spoiler alert: they really do work as advertised. I wore them at a five hour metalcore concert this past weekend and I'm happy to report that I didn't have ringing ears after the show. I also was able to hear all of the frequencies, just quieter. I could still feel the music, and it wasn't *quiet* by any means, but it was not a damaging loudness.One thing to note is that unfortunately, these earplugs cut out conversation almost completely at a concert event. Conversations are hard at a concert event generally, because of all the noise, but these made it noticably harder to hear. I found myself removing one plug if I wanted to talk to my friends.Related to conversation, these earplugs tend to make you talk even quiter than normal. Because of how they sit in your ear canal, you end up hearing your voice pretty loud in your head, so you talk quiter to other people with them in. It's really a minor inconvenience, though, considering that these save your hearing. Again, you can just remove one when you feel the need to talk, and that solves the problem.The downbeats fit pretty comfortably, which is to say that I could wear them for the whole five hours of the show. To me, they feel like in-ear headphones. You definitely notice a pressure in the ear canal, but it's not terribly unpleasant. That means a lot from me, because I *despise* in ear headphones, because I find them incredibly uncomfortable.Luckily, even though these earplugs sit very similar in the ear to in-ear headphones, they stay in much better. One of my biggest fears in getting fancy earplugs was that they would fall out while I danced, jumped, headbanged, and otherwise moshed at the show. I am happy to report that these earplugs stayed in very well, and I never once had a problem with them slipping out or feeling loose. These are earplugs that I would recommend for metal, hardcore, rock, punk, etc shows.The downbeats also don't stick out from the ear very far, which is nice because you don't have to worry about catching a bump from the crowd and shoving the earplug too deep into the ear, damaging the ear drum (rock shows get intense). This also means that the downbeats are pretty inconspicuous, so you don't have to worry about everyone in the crowd knowing you're wearing earplugs.I didn't have any problems removing the downbeats from my ears after the show, although I have read reviews that said people did have some trouble with this. The included carrying case is also a really convenient storage system for when you take the plugs out, which is always a bonus. It's made of metal, and could definitely take a beating, although I didn't subject it to one.Overall, these are highly recommended by me. I liked everything about the product, and I look forward to taking them to more shows in the future. But even if you choose not to get this product, or if it doesn't work for you, wear earplugs to concerts, people.