Intro 

Hi guys, this is Raghav here from Headphone Zone. You're probably listening to the term “In-Ear Monitor” for the first time while you're browsing this incredible collection of headphones on our website and you're asking yourself what's an In-Ear Monitor? and how is it different from any other regular earphone that you may have out there. So I'm gonna try and explain to you what the term In-Ear Monitor or IEM really means. 

What are In Ear Monitors 

Now most of us are familiar with an in-ear earphone, it's a canal-type earphone with the silicon earbud that goes inside the ear canal and gives you a really nice snug fit, blocks out the outside sound and a lot of the earphones that you and I have been using over the last 10-15 years are all in-ear earphones that go in. It's a little bit different from the open-style earbuds that sometimes people who have an old earphone lying around are familiar with, which sits on the outside and in ear earphone goes in, but in-ear earphones on their own are very different from In Ear Monitors. In Ear Monitors were designed by professional musicians and mix engineers for artists, singers, musicians to use on stage. When you're performing on stage as a musician, you need to be able to listen to yourself, your singing, your guitar playing, your drumming, for you to know how you sound with the entire band and traditionally how you would do this on stage, is to use a pair of monitor speakers. Monitor speakers are placed on the floor on stage pointed upwards for you to listen to yourself while you're performing on stage and monitor speakers have been there since time immemorial, but at some point of time people started asking themselves that, ‘hey is there a better way of listening to yourself on stage than having really really loud speakers trying to cut through the sound of the crowd for you to be able to hear yourself?' And an In-Ear Monitors was born. 

In Ear Monitor allow you to listen to your own singing, your own playing on stage by blocking out the sound of the crowd at relatively controlled of volumes. Now with In-Ear Monitors, the emphasis is on quality you want to be able to listen to each and every instrument with perfect accuracy and detail, so In-Ear Monitors can pack a lot of different drivers and speakers into these tiny tiny shells that sit on your ears and can sometimes get a little heavy and therefore they're typically worn over your ears, so that the weight of the earphones is taken up by your earlobe, very similar to wearing a pair of glasses. The weight of the glasses sits on your earlobe with traditionally your phones that you and I are familiar with, we typically just put them into our ear and leave them there but over long hours it pulls down on your ear creating a lot of fatigue and pain and especially if you've got heavy earphones, it cannot be suitable for long hours of listening and In-Ear Monitors is built specifically to be very very comfortable to fit in your ears like a glove and to be used for long hours at an end. Now In-Ear Monitors used to be very very expensive until a few years ago, you would typically find that they would have 8, 12, 15 drivers per side and that costs a lot of money and they can sound fabulous but with time technology has trickled down to a place where today In-Ear Monitors don't cost you more than a few thousand rupees and they can sound absolutely fabulous as compared to traditional in-ear earphones which are out there. You'll find In-Ear Monitors are built for only and only one purpose which is for it to sound incredible. You'll find that the music can sound lifelike, can sound realistic and you find that if they fit in your ear they do a great job blocking out the outside sound, while remaining comfortable enough for you to wear for many many hours at a stretch. Today you'll find that we use the word In Ear Monitors to describe a lot of different high-end, high-quality earphones which are available out there today and the principle is still the same.

All right there you have it folks. That's really the very simple difference between an in-ear monitor and regular earphones. It makes all the difference in the world when you upgrade yourself to an IEM and I highly suggest that you try one out to know for yourself.