For all of us tech and audio guys out there this is a fun ongoing conversation.
IEM’s vs. Floor Wedges vs. Hearing Loss
Floor wedges were great when In Ears were not available. It was such a touring standard that even when everyone moved to In Ears that wedges are still put out too. So there are multiple noise floors to be overcome by the PA. This is great when a musician decides to pull his ears out, or one dislodges itself, or they want an SLP feel firing at them in addition to filling their ears.
Floor wedges are not good in small venues, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in a church or a tiny club.
IEMs are not a purely church world concept and it protects your hearing. Your’e not pounding your head with 100+ DB of sound for hours on end for days on end. You can control it and leave it nice and quiet and best of all for the mix engineers is you’re left with no noise floor to overcome from all of the wedges.
Why do people pull out an ear. There seems to be one thing no matter what is expressed that seems to cause a person to pull an ear out, room feel. Whether they feel isolated and naked without being able to hear the room, cannot feel response from the crowd or cannot hear any other number of elements they feel the need to pop one.
I get it, I really do…but you’re killing your hearing.
If you notice when you do that one of two things happen, (given a monitor engineer scenario) you ask for more output volume to compensate because you’re trying to overcome room volume. Or you crank your wireless pack up for more volume to compensate for the room. Either way you’re blowing your ear drum out because of how close the source is to your ear and as it becomes fatigued you have to crank it up louder, and louder.
Please put both ears in, encourage musicians to put both ears in, encourage subtractive mixing not additive mixing. If you need more vocals try pulling volume back over all to give you the boost, not adding more vocals to the mix.
Also try minimal mixing. You don’t need a full CD mix in your ears, only what will get the job done. Start out with a rhythm instrument or click and a pitch reference and then build from there.
Don’t take it from me…go talk to a hearing specialist!
