In-Ear Monitors :The Fine Print

by brian maddox on May 11, 2010

okay, in my last post i did a little overview of in-ear monitors.  what they are.  what they do.  all that neat stuff.

so, now for more of the rest of the story…

God created a truly remarkable sense when he gave us our hearing.  with only two ears we are able to hear completely 3 dimensionally.  that means we can not only tell if something is left or right of us.  we can also tell if it’s above or below or behind or in front of us.  this is nothing short of miraculous.  nothing we humans have ever built with only two input devices [i.e. ears] can come close to duplicating this ability.

so, in the natural world, our brains are able to ‘sort and filter’ what we hear based on where it is in a 3d space. however, this ability relies on those fleshy funny looking things attached to the sides of our head to distort the incoming sound and therefore give our brain clues that it uses to accomplish this feat.  putting little ear-plugs in our ears that make sound pretty much negates this critical set of input clues.  and this makes in-ear monitors a strictly 2 dimensional hearing experience. this unfortunate fact means that mixing in-ears properly is very difficult to do.  since we only have two dimensions [i.e. left and right].  to mix in, the balance between all these things must be very precise for our brains to be able to differentiate one sound from another.

we then often rely on our ‘unskilled engineers’ to mix their own monitors using inherently limited [by that i just mean it's only got volume/pan for 16 channels.  i like aviom.  i really really do...] personal mixing systems like the aviom.  and that leads to a lot of unhappy performers who say ‘it sounds funny/weird/icky/unnatural when we use in-ears.  let’s go back to wedges’.  that doesn’t mean that using an aviom-esque system is a bad way to go.  it just means you need to know it’s not a panacea or an instant fix to your monitoring woes.  it takes time to train your folks in how to get what they need from the system.  it’ll also take them some time to adapt to what they have lost [that sense of 3d space] and embrace what they have gained [the ability to hear themselves with clarity and precision without hearing fatigue or feedback].

one last word on this subject.  you might be tempted to save money on gear by going with in-ears but running them in mono off of aux sends on your mixer or what have you.  simple answer.  don’t.  just don’t.  unless someone is using only one in-ear to hear a vocal better or something [a practice that has it's own share of downsides, including potential hearing damage], mono is just a really bad idea.  you’re better off not doing it at all.

that’s all for now.  next up, the Occlusion Effect.  oooo.  sounds spooky.

bfn,

brian

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after spending over 20 years making my living ‘making things loud’, i’ve recently settled into a new calling as creative arts director at frederick christian fellowship church in lovely frederick, md. don’t worry, no one else has heard of frederick either. i still enjoy ruminating on all things audio, which is, i suppose, what I’ll be doing here. when i’m not geekin’ on tech stuff, i play some instruments and write music and that sort of thing. i also like cats. my wife does not . . . as much. Learn more about me

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  • Onthuhlist

    Why is mono bad, if your signals are mono? All our mics…mono. Our bass and guitar signals…mono. All the outputs from our Roland TD-20 drum module…set to mono. Only our digital piano is sent to mixing board in stereo, and I actually plan to put it on the MyMix personal monitor bus as stereo. So please explain what you mean???

  • GPTom

    Yes, I’d also like to know why you think running mono is a bad idea. Stereo may be idea, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to qualify your statement that running IEMs in mono is a bad idea.

  • Anonymous

    sorry i didn’t respond to this earlier.  didn’t know there were questions…

    the long answer to why mono is a bad idea for in-ears is covered in my article.  but i’ll reiterate a couple of things.  in short, we need stereo to differentiate different sounds that are the same volume or else they run together into mush.

    now perhaps there was a misunderstanding in terms.  i wasn’t saying that all the inputs into your in-ear mix needed to be stereo.  only that the output of your system into your ears needs to be stereo and you need to have the ability to pan your mono sources into different stereo locations so that you can differentiate between them ‘in your head’.

    when churches are strapped for resources they often try to go with mono auxes fed to a headphone amp as an in-ear system thinking that in-ears are just like wedge speakers.  it just doesn’t work.  trust me, i’ve done the work on this.  i’ve personally trained dozens of people to mix their own in-ears using an aviom system or something like it.  i start by mixing everything together but not panning anything.  i let them listen to that for a couple of minutes and then i simply pan the inputs to various positions and watch their face light up.  ‘wow, now i can hear everything!’  didn’t change a thing other than panning….

    my advice to folks who can’t afford to run in-ears in stereo is to not do in-ears at all until they can.   you’re far better off with wedges and a good education plan with your team to avoid volume wars.  in-ears are a great thing.  but only if you can actually do it right.  otherwise, it’s truly a waste of time and resources….

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