EBS_freak

Read this thread - it should give you a good idea of what to expect

For around 1.4k you could get a couple of active RCF 735s and that means you can do away for the subs for all but the biggest gigs. The higher quality hf driver (3 inch voice coil in this case, compared to the 1 inch drives you tend to get at this price range), means that the woofers are freed up to do more work in the lows... to the point where they can put out enough bass for you to negate the needs for subs. They are a very loud cab, light enough to be manageable and as stated before, for most small (to medium depending upon your definition) venues will negate the need for subs as they will quite happily handle the whole band going through them and remove the need for backline completely (e.g. they won't fart out with kick, toms and bass guitar etc). The 3 inch voice coil in the drivers means that your vocals will be super clear and carry without too much trouble - afterall, vocal clarity is the most important aspect of a live band as punters want to be able to hear the vocals clearly. If the band is looking to all get onto IEMs, you may be hampered by the XR12s two auxes... that may or may no be enough for you.

Well, here's hoping they hold out for a while!

That’s just pants - it’s a part that you’ve got no hope of fixing yourself too because it’s buried into the silicon. :-/ So what’s the plan? Stick until you’ve got some cash to change?

Is it the cable or the connector that is failing?

Man, Moog, I'm sorry to hear about your woes with ACS and especially the cables. They just seem to have outrageously bad reliability with the cables especially and the lack of headroom... Even on my triples, the performance is more than a little disappointing. I don't really know what to suggest but I am sorry to hear about your experience. I guarantee not all IEMs and experiences share the same outcome for the end user. I don't want to sit here and slag ACS - because there are many happy users of them... a couple of guys I know love theirs... but for bass players and drummers, there is something defo not right about them in regard to being able to cope with headroom before distortion in the lows. I know that Andy is dead against big low end... so maybe that is it. The cables though... maybe thats just a result of being a silicon design... I don't know. But I don't know of any other IEM brand that has anywhere near the same failure rate. I landed a mid week residency with a band that don't have any sort of IEM thing going on... so I thought I would break out the ACS lives to use as variable volume ear plugs... oh yes, thats right, the cable was knackered. So took the cable housing apart to see if I could fix it.. and managed to. Got to the gig.. and the mics couldn't handle the SPL of standing next to the drummer (If I padded the input as far as it would go, there was then not enough gain to bring the output up to a decent volume). So annoying because it's such a great concept. Anyway, silicon and cables... is that the problem because they are always subject to a certain amount of flex? Well, I dunno... Spiralear don't appear to have the same issue for example - another silicone based IEM manufacturer.

Good to meet you Nick - took me a while to place you but got there in the end! The UE6s proved pretty popular today... I think out of all the inears that were out, people seemed to gravitate towards the sound (and price) of them. Let me know if you want some help with your sine wave too - I think I made sense with the brief explanation - but hit me up if you need a hand. Currently out and about seeing the sights of Manchester night life... I think I’ve come to sad realisation that I’m beginning to get old... those girls must be awfully chilly in some of the clothes that they aren’t wearing.

All looking good there! Let us know how you get on...! Meanwhile, I been washing my branded tees ready for pimping IEMs at the drum show in Manchester. Come say hi if you are about.

Price drops only seem to be in Europe though.

Boss! Thanks all.

Too late for me, I already went with the 12ts that were more to my taste than the n8ts. Much preferred the timbre in the bass on the former - not to say that one is better than the other, just personal taste.

Whats your band setup looking like? Ideally you should have a PA that it goes through...? If you want to put it into an amp that doesn't send phantom power., you'll need a phantom power injector.

Personally, I'd stay away from IEMs (this coming from me!) and go for larger cans if bass is a priority. You need to spending a lot on IEMs (granted you didn't state a budget) to get as good bass response as some larger headphones - and even then, if you do get some IEMs that buck the trend, say like some ZS10s that have oodles of bass, their phase coherence and overall ability to faithfully reproduce what you put into them, is questionable. They make fine budget monitors for live use but would not be anywhere in my shortlist for critical listening. In short, great sounding IEMs with great bass response and many hundreds (at least 600+ quid, most over 1000) of pounds. Even things like the classic Shure 215s are easily, easily outperformed by a decent set of budget cans. As for suggestions - well, you will get a list a long as your arm... but listen to stuff from Sennheiser, Beyer, AT... and pick the one you like the sound signature of.

In the interests of balance... and cutting the drummers some slack... I do get amused about the posts on here by people that they absolutely must get the fundamental from their bass cab. Congratulations to you guys, you are part of the problem. Mushy muddly low end, often compensated for by not cutting it... but by boosting everything else so the perception of mud is lessened.

That’s the hearing loss and tinnitus for you.

Indeed - but trying to get a guitarist onto IEMs is very difficult! Having been doing the IEM thing at guitar shows, guitarists would rather buy more speaker cabs than anything to do with monitoring.

Large rigs is mostly down to trying to realise the dreams of being a failed rockstar - that Marshall stack is iconic - and of course the only way to get “that sound”. idiots.

Just read back - I may have come across as a bit short and rude. Apologies - it wasn't meant like that if you read it that way!

Indeed - I think it comes down to nobody wants to own part of a PA, or a PA in entirety - but the sad thing is, bands would sound a lot, lot better without the loud, lightweight, compact backline... and better with smaller monitors/IEMs and PA. But the dinosaur thinking of backline first will not go away anytime soon. Those that have been in the inear thread have seen the light.. and I would wager their bands, sonically at least, sound much better from an audience point of view (can't vouch for the playing itself though! :p)

I've had a fair bit of stuff from Hot Covers now. Perfect every time. How covers should be made and I would say that I haven't found a case where they are not superior to the manufacturers own cases.

When is a decibel not a decibel? 😛 Tolerance to loud volumes, well, that’s where the subjective element comes in.

Wrong. See my post above.

This is particular bug of mine... but I'm hoping that what I write here can scratch the surface to help people with their live mixing... First of all, lets look at the volume thing and a thing called the Fletcher Munson curve. In a nutshell, the FM curve does this - At low volumes, our ears are more sensitive to the mids... at higher volumes, our ears become more sensitive to the highs and the lows... so all the detail in the mids (e.g. where the vocals lie), tend to get lost. So in a gig situation, at sound check, things can sound great. As the evening progresses, and as the band volume goes up, there goes your vocals . Also, as the performers ears tire, their ability to hear details in the mids from their amps decreases... so what happens then? They turn up... further compounding the problem. So actually mixing at low volume and simply turning the volume as the punters begin to fill out the room, won't help your mix and how you sound as a band. So there's the first issue. Second issue... Cast your mind back to physics at schools... and wave theory. If you have say, a 150hz sine wave with an amplitude of say x, then if you add a second identical sine wave in phase with the original wave, you'll end up with a single wave, with amplitude of 2x. So what's important about this? In short, the addition of similar frequencies together can cause some very unwanted effects and volume boosts. For example, a lot of bands will start mixing with their kick drum and set that to the volume that they think will suit the band. If you consider say, the fundamental of that drum to be say 35hz and harmonics at 70 and 140... when you lay over a bass guitar that is combining with the frequencies of the kick, you are going to get an increase in volume in the lows due to like waves summing together. An increase in volume in the lows will obviously begin to raise the overall volume of the band and add to the low end mud. This fascination with low end reproduction in cabs has always bothered me - because unless you know what you are doing, all the bass player is going to do is spread a layer of muds in the lows. Now consider two guitarists... sound check 1 guitarist. Sounds great. Soundcheck the other. Sounds great. Now put the two together, and the wave forms of those two guitarist begin to sum - so you aren't just getting the sound of those two guitarists playing together - you are getting some frequencies that are multiplying together to form peaks in the overall mix. So the more instruments you add, the problem starts to compound itself. Then when get frequencies bouncing into open mics and causing feedback loops. Also consider something when micing drums with overheads... that top end air all sounds great in isolation... but when the cymbals are also spilling into other open mics, those high frequencies all start summing... to the point where everything starts to sound really harsh. And what happens when the volume gets turned up, well, the mics start picking up more spill, more summing, more treble... and the more obliterated the mix becomes. I'm amazed at home many people don't understand this - and of course, the average band will then finish with the vocal and then attempt to push the gain, volume, EQ in order for the vocal to cut through the rest of the noise that is coming from the stage. In reality, get the vocal sounding natural (after all, that's what people are MOST interested in) and EQ everything around it, even if the instruments would otherwise sound a bit weird in isolation. Of course, given that the average person doesn't know how to notch frequencies to account for the room, most pub bands end up falling into the above traps. But above all of that, the thing that I can't stand is players that play for themselves, not the band. You turning up after soundcheck screws the mix and makes everybody's sound worse. Cue people turning around and trying to fix what they hear on stage... and there starts the volume wars. You'd never find a sound engineer give a player access to a wedge mix... and this is why. You touching your backline is going to do nothing but screw the mix for the whole band. It makes you a selfish ****. If you cant hear, get yourself an IEM setup so what you chose to listen to doesn't screw with everybody else. IEMs aren't just for stadiums... they can work in pretty much any environment you care to play in. Let the PA do the work - it's more balanced, you have a better control of the frequencies each instrument is producing if it all goes through the desk and is amplified using the PA. Even better, cut the amps completely and the problem of bleed virtually vanishes (obviously things like venue slapback and acoustic drums can still be a problem - but the problem is vastly reduced). Anyway, I'm bored of writing now... but you get the idea.

Pretty much anywhere you want... in the same way that you attach it to an acoustic guitar... blutac!

I suppose if all depends whats in your mic inventory. I personally wouldn't stick a D6 on a cajon due to the inherent upper peak thats useful for picking up the click on a bass drum... not so much use on a cajon. I have a love/hate relationship with the D6 cos of that peak! If you are looking a cheap mics, you could do a lot worse than a bottle top piezo! A bit of EQ here and there - and you can get some quite usable sounds!