A Stage Monitor Is a Private Mix Sold as Hardware

The first thing I learned to carry to a gig was not a cable. It was a roll of white gaffer tape and a marker, because the monitor engineer wanted every wedge on the stage labelled with a name, not a number.

This week Midifan sat down with the two people at Sony behind the IER-M500 in-ear monitor, the engineer who supervised its sound and the planner who shaped the product, and the headline asked the only question worth asking about that kind of object: what problem is a stage monitor supposed to solve? The answer, as the piece frames it, is not a frequency chart. The singer needs to hear her own voice. The drummer needs the click. The guitarist and the bassist each need a different mix. And the person standing behind all of them, the monitor engineer, has to hand every player the sound that is right for them.

I haven't had a pair of M500s in my ears, so I won't tell you how they sound. What I can tell you is that the question is the right one, and most of the industry asks a different one. A studio monitor is built to tell the truth to one person in a treated room. A stage monitor is built to tell each player on a loud stage a slightly different, useful lie: more of me, less of the cymbals, the click a little louder than feels polite. It is a private mix, sold as a piece of hardware.

The same morning the wire carried Clearroom, a new calibrator from Rupendar Venkatesh that corrects both rooms and headphones, as AU and VST3 plugins and as a system-wide audio driver. It is the studio's version of the same promise: make this one listener's room tell the truth. The two stories sat next to each other in the feed and pointed in opposite directions. One tries to take the room away. The other tries to build a small room inside each performer's head.

Strip the product out of what the Sony pair describe and you are left with a job. The best monitor engineers I worked with in Los Angeles almost never talked about gear. They watched faces. A bassist frowning at bar nine meant his kick had disappeared. A singer touching her left ear meant she was drifting sharp and didn't know why yet. The earpiece is only the last inch of that attention; the rest of it is somebody at a desk at the side of the stage who knows what each person needs before they ask.

The last show I mixed before I moved to Tokyo, the drummer walked off, pulled out his in-ears and handed them to me on the way past, still warm, still ticking faintly with a click nobody else in the room could hear.