Apologies if this is in the wrong place.
I’ve been playing keyboards for 15 years, and 3 years ago I went permanently deaf in my left ear. After dozens of gigs with suboptimal stage sound, I’ve finally decided to switch to IEM’s so I can pump a mix directly into my good ear without having to worry about directionality.
I’ll be getting one of these in the near future so I can enjoy the fullness of stereo piano sounds without the usual summing-to-mono weirdness. In the meantime, I’ve bought a Sennheiser XSW set (since it’s one of the more affordable wireless stereo IEM rigs) and I’m just using the stock earbuds until I can plug a Sensaphonic 221 into the receiver.
[NOTE: I know common wisdom is for people with stationary instruments like keyboards to get wired IEM’s. But I tend to have a very active stage presence, especially on gigs that call for melodica, so freedom of movement is a plus]
For the sake of convenience, I decided to buy a small mixer to control my outputs and inputs. All of my instruments go straight into the mixer channels, and one channel (let’s say Channel 1 for the sake of convenience) is reserved for a monitor mix from FOH. Then, I send FOH everything except Channel 1 through the main outs (i.e. the FOH input channel is muted in the main mix, so FOH only gets my instruments without me “doubling” everything else). I dial in my own aux mix (including my instruments and the everything-except-me signal on Channel 1) and feed my IEM’s through the aux out.
It turned out to be harder than I expected to find a small mixer with a stereo aux send (which, as I said above, is something I want so I can hear my piano patches without phase cancellation), but the Soundcraft Notepad 12FX looked like the right solution for the right price. Pressing a button changes the aux send from a balanced mono line out to a stereo headphone out, so in theory I can do everything the way I want to.
My gig last Saturday night was the maiden voyage for this rig, and results were…mixed. There was a lot of noise, both static hiss and some more “dynamic” popping and cracking. Radio interference on the wireless isn’t the culprit, since I made sure the frequency was clean and there was only about 3 feet between the transmitter and receiver. I have noticed that my 12FX is quite noisy: even with every channel cranked all the way down and nothing plugged in, if I slide the Master fader up to 0dB I hear a noticeable hiss from the main outs. Perhaps my unit is defective; I’ll go back to the store tomorrow and A/B with another one.
Beyond that, though, I imagine that I did a lot of things wrong in terms of gain staging, etc. I’ve been trying to find out how far I am from the “right way” of doing things, but some of the online documentation for my gear is quite obtuse, and I can’t figure out the necessary information. So, after far too much preamble, here are my two questions:
- Is it a bad idea to use the aux send on the 12FX in headphone out mode as the input to my IEM transmitter? I know headphone outs tend to be hotter than line outs, but I can’t find any information on how this affects the output impedance (and I’m not even sure what the input impedance is on the transmitter).
- As far as I can tell (but I’m very uncertain on this), on the 12FX’s hybrid channels (1-4), the XLR inputs are mic-level and the 1/4" inputs are line-level, with the XLR’s having constantly active phantom power. Would this be a problem if I’m getting my FOH input via XLR? I assume the XLR outs from the FOH console would be line level, so I’m wondering if that explains some of the noise problems from my gig. Would I be better off getting a TRS input from FOH so I can plug it into a line level input without phantom power?
Sorry for the essay, but any help is greatly appreciated!
I’ve had way bigger problems to deal with on this forum for sure.
