Aviom Personal Mixer: A Personal Review

Aviom mixers are an awesome improvement over floor wedge monitors or any other speaker monitors. Get your sound isolated in your ears using some good in ear headphone monitors. Then you will be able to hear everything at lower volumes and mixed well.

You will save your hearing, improve your tone and musicianship, and shorten your rehearsal and sound check time. Using these aviom mixers is so nice, I would never want to go back to speaker monitors. I can even record a really great mix of our sets by splitting the headphone output and recording with my iPod.

I play electric guitar at my church, and we just started using Aviom personal mixers. This is my review of the mixer compared to what we had been using. We were using floor monitors, with which I had to share the same mix with two other musicians. One was a vocalist.

Sound check took what seemed like half of our practice time, because we generally had to wait until the end of a song, yell across the gymnasium, and tell the sound guys what we need in our mix. Basically, we would get the sound mix as close to what we want as we can and that was that. Some weeks we could hear the other musicians, some weeks we couldn't. I was grateful for what we had because I have played with less, and our sound guys are pretty good at putting up with our demands.

All of this changed when I used the Aviom personal mixers. I am guessing that sound check for the stage is almost a thing of the past. The controls were very intuitive, and I easily figured out how to mix without any training. I may be taking for granted the time the sound guys spent hooking up everything. I used a cheap pair of in ear headphones ($20) and was amazed at how well I could hear each part. Just the ability to pan, by itself, allowed me a spacial sense that I had never had. Now I could hear the vocals in the center and other instruments right and left. The one function I asked about was saving my settings, which was very simple. I really don't care if the settings are different each week, because it is so easy to mix that it doesn't bother me to change it a little each week.

Be careful your first time using the Aviom personal mixer. You will hear everyone in your in-ear monitors so well that you will hear mistakes. Some of those mistakes might be yours. You might become a little shy in your playing when you realize that everyone can hear as well as you. I suggest adding a condenser mic on stage and feeding a little into your mix.  It will add a depth and fullness to your mix.  Otherwise it may sound too dry.  You might decide you need to change your tone a little bit if you hear your electric guitar though the system and not through poor floor monitors.

All of these are potentials for improvement, so in the long run the Aviom personal mixers will improve what your audience hears. It does this in a few ways:

• Improved listening to others in the band
• Improved identification of mistakes
• Better representation of what is sent to the mains
• Less time doing sound check, more time practicing
  

Pros:

• Cuts down on sound check time
• Uses networking cable to power them
• Easy to use
• Savable mixes
• Stereo sound
• Detailed mixing capabilities
  

Cons:

• Expensive to most people
  
• Sounds a little complicated to hook up
• You can hear so well that you hear all of your mistakes