A $116.37 Wireless In-Ear Monitor Solution




 If you're in a band for any length of time, you've probably looked for in-ear monitors and found that the prices are absolutely ridiculous. So did I. That's why I decided to build my own out of some commonly available similar solutions. I've been using this solution for over 2 years now, and although my experience hasn't been flawless, for the money I can honestly say I don't think you'll be disappointed with the results. 

Behringer Wired In-Ear Monitor Amplifier (Currently $45.00)
Dual Driver Headphones (Currently $22.93)
Swiff Guitar Wireless System (Currently $48.44)

optional:




For the price, I don't think you could possibly find another solution that works as well as this does. When paired with a set of any wired earphones, it's a fantastic wired In-Ear-Monitor solution. It operates on a pair of AAA batteries that seem to last a very, very long time. I've used this for 2 years and changed them once - because I accidentally left it on. 

The connector on the P2 accepts XLR, 1/4" TRS(tip-ring-sleeve aka "stereo cable" ), or 1/4" TS (tip-sleeve aka "guitar cable") connections making it effectively completely universal. If you have an old pair of earbuds laying around, and you don't mind being tethered to your mixing board with a cable, you can simply plug the monitor out on your mixing board to the input on the P2, plug in your earbuds, and you're done. If you use a TRS stereo cable, and you have a stereo feed on your board, you can use this in stereo mode. If you plug in a mono source (like you almost certainly will) it will work in mono mode. 




The next part of the magic is "dual driver" "professional quality" earbuds. 
Sure, you could just use those old wired earbuds that came for free with your old iPhone, and they'd work fine. However, the earbuds you typically get for listening to music are eq'd to make the bass louder and emphasize some of the other frequencies to make the listening experience more pleasurable, but often that also makes the music less articulate and tends to blend the instruments together. What you really want is something that at least attempts to reproduce the signal "exactly" as it comes out - which is what studio monitors do. They're usually called "flat response" speakers, and you can also find "flat response" earbuds and over-the-ear headphones too. The problem is that flat response earbuds from major manufacturers are also extremely expensive. I'm sure they're high quality in their own right, but in my experience, these earbuds are going to be used and abused. I needed them to sound good, last a long time, but most importantly - be reasonably priced and replaceable. I know I'm eventually going to break them, spill beer on them, or lose them.




I heard about these KZ ZSN headphones from "Guns and Guitars" on YouTube. To be honest, I was pretty skeptical, especially since the name is completely forgettable and the price is crazy low (currently $22.93). I figured, for such a low price I'd give them a try, and I'm glad I did. I don't really understand what the "dual driver" does exactly, but I can tell you that I hear all of the individual instruments in my headphones better with these headphones than I can with stage monitors. The cable is molded in a way that goes over the top of your ear to hold them in place, so they don't tend to fall out - and if you want you can even pull the plug out of your ear and leave the earbud dangle near your ear so you can both hear the monitor and the ambient stage sound too. I often find that I keep the one in my right ear, but tend to pull out the one in my left ear and let it dangle near my ear so I can still hear my bandmates saying things on stage that they don't say in the microphone. 

Finally,  let's get wireless. 
As I previously mentioned, at this point you could plug your board into your P2, stick your KZ ZSN's in your ear, and have a great solution to on-stage monitoring, but I wanted to be untethered. That's when I asked myself "why can't I use a wireless instrument transmitter/receiver to make this wireless?".  Well, first, it would have to be completely battery-operated. There's no way to make this wireless if I have to plug it in. Also, it needs to be compatible with all of the other wireless things that my band uses, and it needs to be extremely low latency. If you've ever talked on a phone when you could hear yourself echo in the background - that's what happens if you have high latency. It would make it useless.



My bandmate is already using the XVive U2 guitar wireless system. If you've never heard of that before, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It's a fairly solid wireless guitar transmitter that operates on the 2.4Ghz band. Initially, I also used the XVive U2 for my wireless monitor. However, there are a few problems with using *anything* that operates on the 2.4Ghz band. The first problem is that there are only 4 to 6 channels (depending on the manufacturer) available on the 2.4Ghz band. So you're limited to those available channels *at most*. The next problem is that there are a lot of other things that also use 2.4Ghz - namely both WiFi and BlueTooth, so there is *a lot* of interference on that band. Between the interference and the low channel availability, you'll likely never actually be able to reliably use 2.4Ghz devices in a live setting on more than one or two instruments - especially if you're using WiFi with your mixing board. This is a bummer, really, because XVive also sells a relatively affordable 2.4Ghz in-ear-monitor solution for $229.00. However, in my opinion, this solution is only usable if everyone in the band is willing to use the same monitor feed since the channel availability is so limited. That doesn't really work for me or my band, but it might be a good choice for you. 

After some research, I found this Swiff Guitar Wireless System that seemed to fit the bill. The manufacturer doesn't really publish the specifications in a way that makes it easy to actually pin down what band this device is actually using, only that it's operating somewhere between 5Ghz and 9Ghz. They claim there are 100 available channels, and it has a latency of fewer than 2 milliseconds. The XVive has a latency of 5 milliseconds. For reference,  sound travels at approximately 1125 feet per second. At 2 milliseconds, that means you're hearing the sound approximately the same as you would hear it if you put your head 2.25 feet away from your monitor if you're using the Swiff, and 5.6 feet if you're using the XVive. In either case, you're not going to notice any delay. 
In order to use this with your in-ear monitor system, you simply plug the transmitter into your board's monitor send and plug the receiver into the Behringer P2 where you would normally use a cable. That's it. In some cases, you might need to use an XLR (microphone) cable to move the transmitter away from your board to avoid accidentally interfering with other cables, or your board might only have XLR monitor sends. In that case, you can use an XLR to TRS adapter to plug the transmitter into your monitor send. 


The Results

I've been using this setup for over 2 years now, playing at several bars, typically for 3-4 hours a night around 12 times per year. The system has been acceptable for me, but I have to admit it's not 100% perfect.
There are basically two "subpar" things I've run into. The first "problem" is one you'll have with any in-ear monitoring solution - mixing your monitor feed. Using in-ear monitors is a very different thing from using floor monitors, and as such it's quite finicky to get a mix that both provides you with what you want to hear, and the "live" feel of floor monitors. In the end, I've realized that the point of in-ear monitors is to make sure I can hear what I need to hear, and not that I can have a "live" experience. To be honest, I miss the feel of those floor monitors, but the fact that I can finally hear my own vocals and not over-sing to compensate has been a real voice saver for me. Also, over the years I've been able to tune my monitors closer to being able to hear everyone else along with emphasizing my own voice and instruments making it less of an issue, but it's still not the same. 
The second issue is brief but noticeable dropouts. This happened with both the XVive and the Swiff transmitters. I'm not entirely sure of the cause, but for some reason, it tends to happen more often the longer the show goes on. I've tried shutting the transmitters off during breaks, but that didn't seem to have any effect on the dropouts. I've now started running a cable from the mixing board to my microphone stand where I mount the transmitter thinking that maybe I'm putting my body in between the transmitter and receiver. That also didn't seem to change the brief dropouts. Finally, I've also tried changing the channels, which also didn't seem to have any effect. For what it's worth, the XVive transmitters also do this on the instruments so it's not completely related to the in-ear monitor solution but seems to be part of these low-cost battery-operated wireless solutions. The dropouts are so brief that I don't really care that they're there, although if I had purchased a $1000.00 system I'd find them unacceptable. For $116.37 they're worth living with: in my humble opinion. 

Good luck, and let me know in the comments if this helped you out!
~Tom

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