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I've been needing a decent set of in-ear monitors to use for both stage and studio work. I just couldn't get myself to splurge for the super-premium ones where you send away pieces of clay molded to your ears; those are hundreds of dollars and I have no desire to spend that kind of money. After my beloved old Audio-Technica monitors stopped working after years of abuse, I eventually tried a set of "ruggedized" earphones intended for use on job sites, but the bass response was so terrible that I just gave them to my daughter who breaks earphones on a regular basis.
But I'm still pretty frugal, and when I found the Behringer MO240 in-ear monitors on sale for about $40 at Sweetwater (and also at the Beast of Seattle but I try to avoid them) I figured it was worth a shot, I'd probably be disappointed, but I was not disappointed! They have a really comfortable fit, over-ear hooks, dual hybrid drivers, and a nice even frequency response across all bands. I saw another reviewer claim that the bass was weak, but I did not find that to be the case.
The sturdy build and looped cable ends were immediately comfortable. The earplugs did not feel like they were "stuiffed" into my ears the way most earplugs do. I tried a couple of different sound tests. The first test was a play of John Vanderslice's classic track "Bill Gates Must Die" which is my go-to audio test because of its good use of stereo separation, diverse frequency range in the instrumentation, and clean track separation. It did not disappoint. I was able to pick up nuances in this fine piece of music that I had not noticed before even on the big monitors in my studio room.
My next test was to plug them into my Roland Juno-DS 76 synthesizer. I selected an 80's sawtooth patch and played through the synth part to Rush's classic anthem "Subdivisions" on the keys. Good, clean, even response was heard across the keyboard's entire frequency range. After trying a few other parts on piano, organ, pads, and other sounds, I was equally impressed.
This is a good set of in-ear monitors at a budget price. Highly recommended.
On-ear and bone-conduction sets are interesting, and can be useful, but only for casual use. If you're listening to a podcast it's fine. If you're on stage singing or playing an instrument you need full fidelity sound and you usually need ambient sound mostly blocked out.
Over at the church where I play in the worship band, we have little wireless packs for each musician so we can each get a custom mix. It's controlled from an iPad on your music stand, which looks like this:
And yes, it's a tremendous waste of time. In the past we had what the trade calls "more me boxes" which is just the house mix plus the ability to boost your own mic or instrument in your own monitor. It doesn't require a separate mix and a separate channel for each musician, which as you might expect is a big time sink to maintain.
Anyway, when you're doing this kind of work you really need to be able to hear the full range of your voice or instrument, which for me right now is a Roland Juno-DS76 synth. If my earphones don't cover the full frequency range without bias, I'm going to compensate for what I don't hear by playing those ranges and sounds louder. That isn't what we want.
These little Behringer monitors are pretty good. They are dual driver monitors, which means they have both a dynamic driver and a balanced armature driver, with a crossover, just like you'd build a speaker. There are monitors that have up to eight drivers (and somehow still manage to fit in your outer ear) but they get up into the thousands of dollars.