Tucked away

As more and more performers I encounter each year start to use IEM’s, I am glad I have managed to get some good advice on this technology. One of the people who started filling me in during long distance phone conversations, a couple of years ago, was Marty Garcia of Future Sonics. We finally met face to face at NAMM 2001 in Anaheim, and Marty showed me a set of their new reasonably priced EM-3 generic earphone. As I mentioned here at the time, the amount of lower-frequency information that they carried was extremely smooth and seemed like it should not be coming out of such tiny drivers.

I listened through a wireless beltpack to a CD, and wondered what these units would sound like with a band thrashing away nearby instead.

Well, I had an unexpected opportunity to find out, when called to fill in on monitors for the band Cake, on one show, returning full circle to the post I had occupied with them in 1997, before mixing FOH and tour managing all of the shows promoting their next album. I wandered on down to the Mayan Theatre and greeted mixer Will Cotter and the gang, including the Allen and Heath GL 2200-424 desk I had selected for the band in 1999, and the ears rack built to my specs by Rat Sound in 1998.

Ice cream thumper

Cake has two schools of thought going on, first being the old school wedge vibe preferred by lead guitarist Xan McCurdy and bassist Gabe Nelson, while leader John McCrea was happy to go to ears, getting rid of a pair of loud wedges. Trumpeter Vince DiFiore and drummer Pete McNeal, formerly of a Los Angeles band called Sumack, are also on ears, with Pete sitting on an old-fashioned ice cream parlor stool equippped with a shaker rig! Will showed me how their current monitor mixer, Kory Carter, had decided to use an unused headphone amp (Symetrix 420, hot rodded by Future Sonics, and available directly from them) to drive the thumper, in bridged mode.

Will put an inexpensive DOD crossover in line for it, while the other amp in the rack sends the full range mix hard-wired to Pete’s ears.

At first I was surprised that the modest power of a headphone amp would suffice to drive the thumper (admittedly, while clipping from time to time.) All over America, maniacs are constantly hooking up elephant size subwoofer amps to thumpers and generating signal to a terrifying level of intensity. Then I remembered that Marty Garcia actually told me that the law of diminishing returns kicks in when you send too many watts at a thumper, producing distortion rather than a clean hit.

John McCrea’s mix is kept level by a dbx 166, while an Aphex 104 quad comp handles the others. I am told by Future Sonics that this unit is no longer manufactured by Aphex, which is really a shame. I loved it, and thought for the price it was a great deal, for someone who could not afford two Dominators, but it just did not seem to crack the market.

EM-3 without foam

EM-3’s with foams