PRODUCT REVIEW
4 pro Series
Custom Monitors
ULTIMATE EARS
BY JohN BohlINGER
Perhaps it relates back to my over-protective
Italian mother, but I’ve always been leery of
loud stages. When in-ear monitors first began
working their way into Nashville touring acts,
I couldn’t wait to embrace this technology in
hopes of saving my hearing while improving
my live mix. I imagined in-ear monitors would
transform a sonically cluttered stage into a
studio-like, high fidelity headphone experience. Live stages are, for the most part,
doomed to sound bad. The omnipresent
bass muddies the mix, drums painfully bash
away, that snare spiking your brain every two
and four beat, which forces us guitar players to crank loud enough to cut through the
noise. In-ear monitors, in theory, cure all of
these wrongs. Regrettably, the first few in-ear
monitor rigs I worked with made the wedge
nightmare not seem so bad. Poor fitting buds
never sealed out the noise and primitive bud
design reduced the powerful, warm tube
driven roar of my guitar to a wimpy, transis-tor-ish sigh. Vocal tone was equally bad, not
just lackluster, but embarrassingly thin and
lifeless. Sadly, that remained my experience
with in-ear monitors for years. Slowly things
improved, though I never reached the ear nirvana I had first imagined ... until now.
A Joyful noise
The Ultimate Ears 4 Pro series makes good on
the early promise of in-ear monitors. Imagine
a world where guitars sound like guitars,
voices sound like voices, and drums and bass
reside in the mix rather than over the mix.
The UE 4 are very transparent, giving you
back an extremely accurate representation of
the natural timbre of instruments and voices.
Now I understand why 75 percent of today’s
top touring professional artists—including
bands such as Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones,
Metallica, Van Halen, Sheryl Crow, Sugar Ray,
The Killers and SwitchFoot—use Ultimate Ears
custom in-ear monitors.
I test-drove the UE 4 on a large, open-air
festival gig and a smaller 2,000 capacity club
gig with a low ceiling, (a potential stage mix
nightmare). In both environments the UE 4
Pros worked perfectly; they were comfortable
and sounded clear and accurate with no discernible distortion. Being able to hear everything so well really made the gigs fun. The
UE 4s sounded better than any in-ear system
I’ve ever used. I was so impressed with the
UE 4 Pros that I brought them along to a
recording session where they sounded
