Engineer and musicians loved them.

We have used various personal monitoring systems including Furman, Aviom, Proco Momentum, and now the Roland RSS M-48. While the Proco has 32 seperate channels the M-48 has it beat with several other features plus the fact you can use any of the 48 channels on the M400 console and just group them into 16 channels, so you really still have more channels that it sounds. Plus the musicians love the onboard EQ, reverb, and ambience mic. My pianist is usually the hardest to please and he loves these units. My life is easier when setting these up since you can do it directly from the Roland console or even better from the software on a PC. The entire RSS system (M400, M380, RSS Snake, and M48 mixers) are just one great integrated system.

Great system

We recently bought a roland m400 and six of these roland m-48's for our church. We were in between Aviom and this system, and we ultimately went this route because it was newer and I was never really that impressed with Aviom. Let me just say, I'm glad we did. If you've ever played with the Aviom system, you know some of the challenges and limitations it has... This system improves on many of those flaws and sounds great doing so.

Probably the biggest advantage over aviom is the ability to eq each channel. A great in ear mix is accomplished by levels, sure... But panning and eq really make for a great mix... Throw in the ability to add a little reverb, and activate the limiter, and there's really no comparison.

Again, I'll just say that I'm extremely pleased with the sound quality of these units and have really loved using them... Now let me give you a few drawbacks.

First, the ambient mic is borderline useless in a musical setting. This was a huge bummer for me, because I was very excited about the idea of an ambient mic... In ear mixes can be a challenge for some, if you're not used to it... And in my setting we're getting a lot of long time players to try in ear for the first time... Their biggest complaint is almost ALWAYS, that they can't hear the rest of the band... or it sounds too "in the box". I was hoping the ambient mic feature would help that.. But it was basically useless musically.

The ambient mic IS useable if you're just trying to hear another musician talk across the stage... But, musically speaking it's a very noisy mic and at levels above about 1/4 it adds too much hiss to use. Instead, we just set up a few condensers on the stage and feed those into the in-ears, and that seems to work great.

Second complaint is this... We outfitted our band with wireless in ear transmitter/receivers (sennheiser ew 900) to go in combination with the m-48, so that they wouldn't have to be "wired" and could move around the stage, but would still have the advantage of setting their own mix... One thing to note about doing this (something I wasn't aware of until I hooked the system up through the line outs on the m-48) is that the ambient mic as well as master eq doesn't work through line out. Not a HUGE problem because I rarely use the ambient mic, but it would have been nice to know.

Besides that, these are great systems. I would recommend them over the aviom or hearback pretty much any day.