Etyomic Research makes these headphones that are PERFECT for motorcycling in a multude of ways.  Firstly, it actually fits in your helmet.  For me with my giant ears, I have problems fitting normal ear buds (like Apple’s or whomever’s) into my ears comfortably while wearing my helmet.  The second is that when you wear normal ear buds in your helmet you have to listen to them very loudly as the sound coming out of them needs to be even louder than your alrady noisy helmet.

The ER-6 solves both of these problems and produces some amazing sound from such a tinny ear bud.  Firstly, the driver/earbud is tiny and will fit in almost any helmet.  Then… Instead of a hard plastic speaker that you shove into your ear, the ER-6 has various attachments for various ear shapes.  They’re soft gelly molded in shapes that resemble ear plugs, instead of speakers.

Since they go so far into your ear and in fact are shaped like ear plugs, they isolate you from outside noise.  If you just put them in without music, they’re nearly as effective as good ear plugs.  Once you turn the music on.. get ready!  They sound infinitely larger than the tiny little ear buds that they are in reality.  Suprisingly deep bass, great highs, it is amazing!  Since they are so isolating, you can turn the volume of your mp3 player way down.  Not only is this better for your ears, but it also uses much less battery.

After saying all these great things, my ER-6s broke.  One of the channels was nearly silent.  Yeah, I was not too happy about it.  Atleast they broke at a time when I was in very curvy roads (Guatemala Highlands) instead of straight boring roads (Mexican Coast).  I went earbud free for all of Guatemala.  While driving through the “Desert” south of Coban, I tried my backup ear buds and they were terrible.  I had to crank the volume way up to hear anything.  I ended up stopping and not using them.

After being robbed around Atilan (can I make a single entry without mentioning it??), I had a package coming from the US with a new camera and ATM card, so I decided to have a replacement set of ER-6s sent from Amazon.

I got them in today and was idly reading the directions (wow!).  They came with spare “filters”.  Curiously I read on… apparently if you have reduced volume in one of the channels, you just replace the filter and BAM.. good as new.  SO after replacing the filter, BAM.. Good as new =] .  Whats funny is that I put both buds into my ears and realized that my OTHER earbud had reduced volume, so I changed that filter.  BAM.. just like new ear buds.

So the good news is that I have two basically new sets of ER-6s, bad news:  I paid a crapload of money from Amazon and importing/shipping to get new ear buds and all I needed were new filters.  I like to have backups of critical gear.

I *HAD* a backup of my ipod, an Ipod shuffle.  However it fell out of the bike when I hit a speedbump back in Belize and unknowingly had my topbox open.  Oops.