I had some molds made for some custom musician's ear protection last week. They should be in soon. I booked a bunch of dates running sound for country bands i

I had some molds made for some custom musician's ear protection last week. They should be in soon. I booked a bunch of dates running sound for country bands in a noisy dive bar. I don't see why they wanna play that loud, but it's their show. Personally, I want the mains to be louder than the monitors, if just out of consideration for intelligibility with the crowd. The mold process was painless. I am curious how they will sound; ostensibly they are acoustically "flat", but given that our hearing response changes based on volume level I am skeptical. Hopefully they will be better than the cheap stuff I've been using. I have used a set of Shure se215 for the last 5 years and they're freekin' great for, like mowing the lawn. Less good for playing in bar bands where I may have to interact with the audience. All that said, I can see spending the 5-800 that custom IEMs run... but I can't see doing that if I didn't have to wear them on stage in a professional environment regularly enough for them to outpace the cost of a powered speaker. Hell, I had a hard time dropping the $200 on hearing protection-- I usually just won't play with folks who play that loud. But I don't have a lot of choice when I am engineering other folks' shows.