The IEM (in ear monitors) Bible thread - a guide to help every musician

[kiat]

Any recommendations for my playing situations?

 

Which are (a) pub cover bands, (b) jam nights and open mics, (c) rehearsals and (d) home learning and practices. I'm on a budget and looking at £300 max for systems with no latency issues and reasonable audio that doesn't break up or sound shitty on the low strings. A little hiss would be ok.

 

I'm looking at an XVive type system for (b) and (c) and a rackable system for (a) and (d)**

 

A wireless system might come in handy as I've just got an analogue  splitter/mixer to use as a band IEM mixer and we all need to get feeds from the headphone amp it feeds.

 

**though I've got a wired setup as a backup with a MA400 personal monitor amp fed PRE from my pedal's DI out and POST into a DI box, which feeds my stage amp. FOH can take the PRE or POST from either thru port.

 

I've read mixed reviews of the XVive U4. A sax-playing mate has one, but she doesn't like the cut-outs in a busy gig.

[warwickhunt]

To avoid the drop outs you'd be better off avoiding the 2.4 systems as that is where most of the issues occur, however some folk manage perfectly well with them.  

 

If you want low/no latency you really want to be avoiding the cheapie (sub £60) systems... with the caveat that plenty people manage with the latency (be aware latency is cumulative if you have other digital systems in your pathway; inc radio trans/rec, desks etc). 

[Woodinblack]

44 minutes ago, kiat said:

Could you post a link to your Lekato model?

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/404205416058

 

[kiat]

Is anyone using this Behringer MX882 mixer/splitter (or similar) at the heart of a band IEM solution?

 

Interested to hear about your experiences with solutions like this.

Mine arrived today and it's very promising for my use case: a cheap, easy to use reliable starter IEM solution for small bands.

 

It provides a split for each signal (vocal mics, 2 drum mics, guitar bass) to FOH and a common mix from it's twin XLR main outs to this simple multi-headphone amp powering 4 x IEMs, wireless or wired.

 

 

When I route the main XLR outs into my Scarlett 4i4 XLR ins I set them to route to the headset out (3/4) and connect that with a TRS cable to the headphone amp.  Because there are 4 line outs on this audio interface I can create two extra stereo pairs for extra IEMs. And can record the whole lot live over a stereo mix to my laptop (Linux with Ardour using Pipewire).

 

Any band member can add more of themselves with these personal monitoring amps that they use to split their own signal before it gets to the MX882.

 

The IEMs we're trying out are the inexpensive KZ EDX Pros, in keeping with the low cost as we are experimenting with our first foray into IEMs, with a view to upgrading everything as and when.