Hmm.. I had a conversation with my audiologist when picking up my Westone custom molds...
So here's a review of the experience I've had with the Shure E5, part of it with the Westone custom molds here:
http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showt...threadid=46080
In case you didn't catch that thread... It might give you some indication of Westone's quality (I was not too happy with their custom molding, at the end of it all).
Anyway, I did talk to my audiologist of what she thought of Westone's earphones. Turned out, if you look across their product line, you see a lot of similarities between Westone's product specs and Shure's.
The history goes like this... Shure was moving into the personal monitor (that's what they call these canalphones... for professional music use) market, but they didn't have manufacturing capability of their own. Westone was the company they contracted to make their personal monitors at first. Of course, over time, as Shure started doing their own manufacturing, they started suing each other for various intellectural property and such. It got pretty ugly.
So older products, such as the Westone UM1, is actually an copy of the Shure E1 design.... My audiologist's experience with them though, has been very different than her experience with Shure's earphones. Long and short of it, she believes that Shure has superior products.
Now, I can't tell you not to get Westone's earphones, because I have never heard them myself. However, on paper their equivalent product doesn't seem to compete as well against their Shure counterparts...
As my audiologist said, "If you had to get a product, wouldn't you rather to go to the original designer rather than the manufacturer, if you had a choice?" From her perspective, Shure knew how to design products much better than Westone... of course, now they don't use Westone for manufacturing either.
