Love the Ads on YouTube! But….Will I Ever Use the i2i Stream?
August 25, 2008
Awhile back, I received an offer to review a set of i2i Stream wireless broadcaster/receivers. Honestly, I didn’t really know how they were supposed to work until I watched a couple of the videos on You Tube. Those videos make me decide I just HAD to try a set out.
For those of you who don’t know what the i2i Stream is, you can find a complete description of the product on the website. The whole idea behind this nifty little gadget is being able to share music wirelessly with your friends. OK, so you can both listen to the same radio at the same time. Isn’t that sharing? Well, sure, but what if you want to listen to one station while your friend wants to listen to another station. What do you do? You end up fighting over which station you want to listen to. What if you have some way cool music on your MP3 player you want your friend to hear and what if you don’t have external speakers for yours? What if your friend wants to share his or her MP3 music with you? I guess you just have to swap MP3 players. OK, I think you get the picture. The i2i allows both of you to listen to your stuff and your friend’s stuff without having to pick just one of them to listen to. You can send and receive music to and from each other just by pressing a button.
OK, personally, I have no need for a gadget like this. I don’t have an MP3 player and if I want to share music on my laptop, I’ll just play it through the external speakers. So, why review it? I had another use for the i2i that I wanted to try. If you read this blog at all, then you know I play bass guitar with my husband and some friends in our band, Diezelfitter. One of the problems we’ve had is that we only have one monitor. My husband, Rick, who is the lead guitar player and vocalist, and Chuck, the other guitar player and vocalist, use our one and only floor monitor to hear themselves sing. Our drummer, Gary, has a mic stand monitor that he uses to hear Rick and Chuck sing AND it can run 2 other monitors. I don’t have anything. SO…I wondered if I could use the i2i to broadcast the signal from Gary’s monitor to my headphones which would mean we really don’t need another monitor. Here’s what I found out about using the i2i as a wireless monitor:
- First of all, the i2i didn’t work with Gary’s monitor. It went haywire when we plugged it in where another monitor would normally go. The channels constantly changed from one to the other and I never heard anything through my headphones. It did work when I plugged it into the PA, however, but only through one earphone.
- Being a poor band, we have a lot of stuff that’s held together by “rubberbands and wire” as our musical mentor, Peter Karp would say. This experiment in wireless represents the ONLY wireless equipment we have. That means we have cords and cables snaking everywhere, including cables that connect our guitars to our amps. That means that even though the signal the i2i uses to broadcast/receive is wireless, the earphones and the i2i have to be connected with wires. Hey, I already have a guitar strap around my neck and a cable connecting my bass to my amp. Even though I’m only receiving and don’t need to plug a source into the i2i, I still have to have a wire that connects my headphones to it. Luckily for me, I’m not a singer, or I’d also have to deal with the mic cord, too.
- The signal was good and the sound was clear. I walked outside of the basement where we practice and could still hear Rick and Chuck singing through their microphones but that’s not really an issue since we’re never very far apart.
- I only tried the i2i during practice, not during a live gig. Yeah, it’d be great to have my own monitor but I’d probably trip and/or strangle myself with all the wiring. Besides, headphones look goofy on stage and I hate earbuds so I guess I’ll hold out until we make enough money for me to have my own monitor (I really like Gary’s mic stand one).
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