More importantly IEMs accomplish two tasks at once. First, they isolate use from the noise. They dont actively cancel the noise out like Bose has been so famous for doing, rather they passively prevent the sound from ever reaching your ears. Bose and other noise-cancelling headphones have a microphone built into the unit itself, it picks up the sound around you and then recognizes the sounds and produces sound waves that will cancel out the ones around you. IEMs rely on simply creating a tight seal with the inner part of your ear, not allowing it to ever come in. Shure even includes a foam tip that resembles what a standard ear plug looks like, as they function in identical ways. Secondly, IEMs produce extremely good sound quality, not only do the drivers (mini-speakers, things that produce the sound) that come in IEMs tend to be much better then your standard Apple headphones, but because the tight seal with your ear has occurred, the sound goes straight to your ear, rather then bouncing around and escaping through cracks in between your ear and the headphone. They also produce pure sound as opposed to what comes from active noise-cancelling headphones which has been tainted by the additional waves used to cancel the noise. There are also two other significant benefits over active noise-cancelling headphones: first is that they require no additional battery and secondly that they are much smaller, similar to your standard Apple headphones
), and I am looking for a replacement.
