Low cost and reliable in-ear monitoring for CQ-18T

[Houston Musician]

Been watching so many vids by now that I am kinda losing it.
Is the XVive good enough? 4 people band, like to keep cost low or let’s say reliable and good quality but as low cost as those two previous words would bear 🙂
Let me know what you suggest.
Singer, drummer, bassist and guitarist. Have option to route DI, drums have trigger system, can also go with a PZM mic, guitar amp has DI speaker emulated out.

[Chienmort]

There are many reviews of Xvive IEMs on YouTube, Look out for Scott Uhl On that platform.

There has been a healthy debate about the use of IEMs on the Basschat forum, search for the IEM Bible thread at basschat.co.uk.

I have not used Xvive Myself Butt they use the same frequency as Wi-Fi for their wireless devices and they are digital transmission. This means that there is inherently a delay sometimes called latency That may or may not cause you a problem. You will see wild claims around the Internet about how much latency is too much and many claim they can hear one millisecond. In my case, I’m happy with anything up to about 10 ms and from memory most of the far eastern digital wireless devices are in the 3 to 6 mS Range for latency.

You can of course use a UHF system that will have minimal or no latency, although these tend to use compansion. This is where the signal is compressed for transmission and decompressed or expanded at the receiver end. Either way the best quality systems cost.

I’m sure others will chime in with their experience but in the end you must decide yourself which criteria works for you.

One thing that I will advise though is to consider how many channels you need. Many devices, especially those working on the shared frequencies, both digital and UHF have a limited number of simultaneous channels available.

[Brian]

The best low cost IEM solution is always going to be a wired solution. Something like the Behringer Powerplay P1 work great and are only $50 in the US currently (after Behringer’s recent price cuts). If you are honest with yourself, most musicians are stationary and don’t need a wireless system. Certainly drum and keyboard players are stationary, but even guitar and bass players tend to be stationary unless they also have wireless instrument connections. This leaves just the singer who legitimately might need a wireless system if they tend to jump around stage (and what singer doesn’t?).

So save money by going wired for all stationary players and then get a decent wireless system for anyone that really needs it. Just understand that decent means at least $1000 per stereo wireless setup.

[Houston Musician]

There are no stationary players, we’re all over the place and even swap stage right with stage left for some songs with the bassist…ever our drummer moved quite a bit, but I guess he’s about the only one that can be put on wired headphones.

[Houston Musician]

XVive is about 5ms…which might be good enough, although we do have a few 170bpm songs where the drummer plays super fast.

[HonkyTonkKJ]

All WiFi has latency the more congested the frequency ether 2.4 or 5.8 it will raise. I been in the WiFi business sense 2005. Your best beat is to use an independent WiFi access point and not the built in system. Also get the router above all equipment to not block the WiFi signal very important for 5.8 to really run low latency.

[willmodelisme]

For a wired IEM I would better go for a small analog mixer instead.
As from 70 bucks you have better control on you mix than with Beh.P1.
Alto TrueMix500 or even better Mackie Mix8.

[Chienmort]

How would a small Analogue mixer help? You have 6 Aux outputs on the CQ18/20 which are in effect mixers in their own right. Using a P1 type device makes thing simple.

[willmodelisme]

P1 and other similar wired IEM system are just a 2 channels phone level amplifier that convert 2 balanced input to a unbalance (stereo) Output.
Little mixer like for example a Xenyx 802S do the same plus a 3 band eq.
If you have already such a small mixer in your rig and for more static case, where you don’t need to wear your IEM system, just the earplug, why not use it ?

[Author]

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