budget wired IEM setup

G

Gary Fitzpatrick

Freshman
Jan 3, 2012
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Fermanagh, Ireland
One of the bands which I'm working with is looking into going down the IEM route and i'm looking a little advice.

First a bit of background. They are a four piece irish folk band. Four girls...
  • girl 1: Vocals, guitar, keys
  • girl 2: vocals
  • girl 3: Vocals , Fiddle
  • girl 4: vocals, guitar, mandolin
The guitars, fiddle and mandolin all have pickups installed.

They are not particulary active onstage so I think a wired set-up would be fine...the instruments are all hardwired so one more wire isnt going to make a ton of a difference.

I was thinking of using small bodypacks such as these for each of the performers.
http://www.thomann.de/gb/fischer_amps_mini_bodypack_klinke_mit_ls.htm

From what i understand, I would still need a headphone pre-amp, so I was thinking of getting one of these...
http://www.thomann.de/gb/millenium_hp_4.htm

What would you think of this for a set-up? Would it work?

I'm guessing some sort of limiting would be a good idea. Would the like of this do the job?
http://www.thomann.de/gb/behringer_mdx4600_multicom_proxl.htm

All in...it works out at about GBP£285 for 4 monitor mixes before the actual headphones themselves...about US$450 or so....

Am i completely off the ball?
 
Re: budget wired IEM setup

if you wear IEMs you WILL get hammered by something sometime. and it hurts! limiting of some kind is not optional...

that being said, for a relatively low volume act, a simple, cheap brick wall safety limiter could easily suffice. doesn't need to sound good when it's in limiting. just needs to keep from bursting your eardrum. a louder act will need something a bit more musical [and expensive] 'cause their gonna end up hitting it a lot more often...
 
Re: budget wired IEM setup

Ron Kimball said:
Don't matter - dropped mic or mic pointed at monitor = goodbye hearing :( .
Click to expand...

UM What monitor(s) ? - everyone is on ears.... and again if a dropped mic will bang your hearing out, again - they are too loud...

I guess I'm in a special case where we're all on ears, no accoustic instruments including drums, but still even when we had amps
and real drums, I don't recall ever being in a situation where my ears were that loud to injure my hearing... maybe just lucky.
I've turned on ipods that had volumes more ripping hear them outside the wearer, than I've EVER had my ears, and I play drums.
oh well to each his/her own....
 
Re: budget wired IEM setup

Ron Kimball said:
Don't matter - dropped mic or mic pointed at monitor = goodbye hearing :( .
Click to expand...

I have to question the limiter thing too. How do the Mfrs know where to set the limiter to? The sensitivity of in-ear drivers can vary a lot. I can see the value of a limiter on the aux out of the desk as you actually have some tools to determine what a normal level is and limit the max level to some pre-determined level above that, but I fail to see how a pack limiter makes any reliable difference.

With my Sennheiser IEMs, my "limiter" is the gain structure I set on the transmitter - keeping the nominal level hotter than -10dBFS gives me a known hard ceiling. Bad gain structure- a signal too low on the transmitter and turning the pack up too much is where you get in trouble.
 
Re: budget wired IEM setup

TJ Cornish said:
I have to question the limiter thing too. How do the Mfrs know where to set the limiter to? The sensitivity of in-ear drivers can vary a lot. I can see the value of a limiter on the aux out of the desk as you actually have some tools to determine what a normal level is and limit the max level to some pre-determined level above that, but I fail to see how a pack limiter makes any reliable difference.

With my Sennheiser IEMs, my "limiter" is the gain structure I set on the transmitter - keeping the nominal level hotter than -10dBFS gives me a known hard ceiling. Bad gain structure- a signal too low on the transmitter and turning the pack up too much is where you get in trouble.
Click to expand...

i agree that pack limiters are next to useless. the in ears i use are very sensitive so they'd blow my ears out before a pack limiter would ever come on. even shure has figured this out and replaced their limiter in the new PSM900 and PSM1000 with a 'volume limiter' which is really just a preset max volume for the volume knob, which is very handy, but not a signal limiter of any kind.

you are also quite right that gain structure is the real key here. in fact, if you get the gain structure wrong, an RF hit can be the worst offender since you've got the pack up too high to compensate for not enough level coming into the transmitter....
 
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