While going deaf for the rest of the night at a rock show is something of a rite of passage in my opinion, I'm starting to get too old for it, and the pursuit of a career as a sound designer means that I need to value my hearing more than ever. I needed a set of earplugs to wear to shows, and I wanted something better than the foam ones that are so ubiquitous. I like these. Any earplug is going to attenuate sound unevenly in some way or another; while I don't understand the exact details, I do know that it's basic physics that you can't attenuate everything evenly, especially in an earplug form factor. Using these earplugs, some high-end attenuation is very apparent. What's important is that it's not as severe as using the cheap foamies that we've all stuck in our ears at some point or another. I've found that over the course of an evening you get used to the characteristics of the attenuation, and stop really thinking about it. Unprotected, my hearing would start to dull after the opening acts, so that by the main event things sounded muffled anyway. At least this way I can walk out of the venue at the end of the night and still hear properly. I had some trouble initially getting a good seal in one ear. I stored the earplugs, unused, for several months with the second (middle) flange flipped inside out. Whether this helped or not, I don't know; but I store them this way so that the middle flange will hopefully get flexed a little wider and give a better seal. I don't flip them back before sticking the plugs in my ears, either. This seems to have worked, as I got a decent seal at both of two shows just recently. This was my main concern with the earplugs when I first got them; after all, if there's no seal then they aren't really protecting your ears. One quality which weighed heavily in the Pacato's favor over other plugs was that they don't protrude from the ears when being worn, unlike some others with stems which look like little alien antennas. These plugs are pretty discreet and don't look goofy. They can take a little effort to remove, depending on your individual anatomy. I have some trouble getting a firm grasp on the little tabs, but I've never been in a situation where I really struggled with them, so it's nothing more than a minor inconvenience. As a musician, I haven't used these while playing, so I can't speak to using them for that purpose. I would certainly want to take them out anytime I was setting my guitar tone, as the aforementioned attenuation is uneven and would give a very false impression of your tone. I suppose once the sound I was after was achieved, I could put them in and play, but many guitarists make minor adjustments to their sound constantly, so I'm not sure how that would work. I'll have to try them sometime. All in all, a solid purchase. Cheaper than going to a big-name show, and they should protect my ears through many of those.
