personal ear monitors

[mutt]

This is a live performance question. Our band is looking into getting personal ear monitors (we're tired of lugging so much stuff around) but our lead singer heard from someone in another band that the PEM's don't always work and they've had trouble with them. (I don't know what make or model of PEM's the other band has). We're looking at the CARVIN PM 1000 - 16 channel PEM. Has anyone had any experience with this unit, or other makes? Any particular unit you would recommend? Or any preferences as to why you would or would not use PEM's?? We don't want to drop a bunch of cash if they're not going to work right.

Thanks in advance -

mutt

 

[Garak]

Personal ear montiors are more commonly known as in ear montiors (IEM).

The most trusted brandname is shure and most people wouldn't use anything else. The reason is that your talking about your hearing here, you don't want something that is going to destroy your hearing. The shure system has builting limiting designed to protect your hearing, most of the cheeper systems do not!

The other thing is that IEMs are useless if you don't have everything miced on stage. Good IEM's are like earplugs, they block out everything on stage so that you can turn the mix down in your ears and save your hearing, the only problem is that you can only hear whats in your mix. In some cases people have crowd mics and extra vocal mics on stage so they can talk to their band mates without going through foh.

I wouldn't suggest switching to IEM unless you have a dedicated montior board on stage where you or your BE can create a good mix for you.

anyway for more on this topic search the LAB(live audio board) at www.live-audio.com (this is a pro board so read the rules and the archives before posting)