Not just monitoring at shows. I wear mine at shows even when not monitoring. I'm always suprised how many people don't wear hearing protection. Having the feeling of something stuffed in your ear might be annoying to some people, but hands down it is better to deal with the mild discomfort than have ringing ears and hearing loss.
When listening day to day you still get the benefit to your ears because you are not cranking the volume to drown out the noise around you. With the er-6's even the crappy headphone amp in my md deck is more than enough.
They are perfect for both uses. A few years back, a bunch of us were at a garaj mahal show, all stage lip. By Carl's meter spl was something like 115-125. With Nick's er-4's I could hear the recording coming through his soundfield over the pa less than 5 ft from my head. I'm sure they will have no problem blocking out the tv.
JAson
125db was the highest peak that night, I remember it well!
Great recording to, one of my best Mid-Side jobs w/the ST-250. Loved that thing...it was like a penis to me, only bigger.
Any way, yea, the Ety's are worth their salt. Fucking awesome isoation.
The first time I used them was taping Kimock on 2-15-03 ....where I got to meet Scott Brown that night.
Any way, this was also my first outing w/the soundfield...and I had yet to learn that I needed to engage the -20db pad at all times. So there I am at stage lip, and its fucking LOUD. I've got the 4ps in my ears very deep and tight, as they should be...and I'm hearing this distortion...no matter how I adjust the gain on my V3 it was still present. I could distinguish it easily. It went away when I hit that pad on the mics controller, of course. But not before I thrashed the first few minutes of "up to you". Pissed me off !
Back on topic, the Ety's are *the* monitoring system for what we do. You can hear the recording through them at a low volume. No cranking the cans at all to hear over the ambient sound in the room. Nice and easy listening. In fact, if you wear ear-plugs normaly, using these and monitoring your recording a nice comfortable level is better sounding than using Ety plugs and letting some sound squeek in though those.
I'm sure the SURE version works just as well, i'd bet.
The 4 series is regarded as one of the top headphones on the planet, and i'd put them up agaistn anything else.