With personal monitor systems now the norm in studios everywhere as well as on stage, there should never any excuses for cue mix complaints anymore.

That said, some studios or live acts are limited in the number of boxes they have, so many times players end up sharing a mix, which usually results in at least one party being unhappy.

The new Livemix personal monitoring system from Digital Audio Labs takes care of that in that each box provides two separate mixes, plus the mix can go up to 24 channels wide.

Livemix provides an economical way for two players to share the same mix box, plus provides onboard compression, EQ, and reverb processing on each channel. The unit utilizes a combination of knobs and touchscreen control to make it easy to use, and also provide an input control for a local click or music player on each box. It even has an optional foot controller for hands-free changing the volume during a performance

Each Livemix controller (called the Livemix CS-Duo) feed via a Cat5 cable to a Livemix Mix-16 central unit that supplies up to 16 mixes through up to 8 CS-Duo boxes. If A/D conversion is required, a Livemix AD-24 unit is available to take 24 inputs of line level analog and covert them to digital. The digital inputs are accessed via Dante.

One of the problems I’ve found with giving musicians too much control of their monitor mix is that they can get into more trouble than it solves sometimes. Add processing and you’re opening up a whole other can of works. That said, if the mix is set up ahead of time by the engineer and the player has the ability to tweak it, that’s usually the best of both worlds, so the extra features of Livemix can really come in handy.

Livmix was announced at last years NAMM show but only began shipping last month. Street price for a package of 4 CS-Duo controllers, an Mix-16 and AD-24 is expected to be around $3,999. Find out more on the Digital Audio Labs site.