in ear monitor systems

[Bill Foss]

Can anyone recommend a good in ear monitor system? What's the best? What would fit a budget of about $1,200?

[MontanaMatt]

My band uses the Sennheiser EW300 system. It has been great for us. With four body packs it might be a little past your budget though. They resist drop damage and get good gig life off rechargeables. The features lend to easy gig setup and great sound quality. IEMs are the best, I highly recommend the investment.

[Beanzy]

I'm cheap old fashioned sort & still use wired via the AuxBus and a bog-standard earpiece set up via floorboxes on one cable loom.
No latency or interference issues and any small or stringy stage cabling is local to the player position.

But in work I installed a Sennheiser system based around 8 EK receivers & SK transmitters using their WSM system.
That's a bit irrelevant for your budget, but it puts the first sentence in context;
Unless you're going wireless for tx & rx is it really worth the money?

If you're running wired from the instruments anyway why not make up a loom and drop cables for the lot both ways?

[almeriastrings]

First caution is avoid all the cheap wireless systems. Cheap and IEM's are an unholy alliance....nothing but trouble.

The above-mentioned Sennheiser EW300 is really solid, reliable, and sounds excellent. It would be top of my shopping list.

[Bill Foss]

Thank you all for the input Cafe members. This helps point me in some good directions.

Beanzy, you raise some good questions that I need to consider. Wireless is appealing because I have to move around on stage quite a bit and we have 2 (!) electric basses in the band with their accompanying cables already. It's getting crowded up there. Thanks for your input. I don't know what you mean by a loom. Could you elaborate?

[Beanzy]

Basicaly one chunky multicore cable from the desk to a stagebox with a selection of male & female XLRs or jacks as required at the desk end and whatever you need at the first box. Then there's another smaller multicore to the next box and so on until you've covered all the positions. So box 1 may get from the desk to 1st position on a 24way cable, use 8, then have a 16 way to box 2, use 4 & on to box 3 on a 12 way etc onwards.

You can get fancy and have multi-pin connectors to enable the boxes to be removed as needed.
But for most bands a box between the frontmen and a couple more to make a loop of the other band members is normally enough.
I just hard-wire mine and coil it all up in one crate.

You can buy ready mades,

but they tend to be single run, so it's more cable runs from the desk across the stage.

[Bill Foss]

Thanks Beanzy, that clarifies a lot for me.

[BrianWilliam]

Going the wired route, what do y'all think about the ultimate ears sound tap: http://pro.ultimateears.com/products...age/uesoundtap

[Jeremy Elliott]

Another vote for the Sennheiser EW300 system. Been using them for over 3 years now along with an Ultimate Ear earpiece and absolutely love the setup. Can't believe the difference they make. IMO can't go wrong with them.