If you do get the budget, the XR18 makes a great live tool. As you said, you can use it like a stage box, so it gets rid of having to use snakes, etc.
In theory you can operate it wirelessly, but the WiFi on it is not great, especially when it’s sat on a stage surrounded by guitar stands, drum kits, and a mess of other cables.
When I’ve used it for gigs, I take a long network cable and a cheap wifi router with me and hard wire it to the router and a laptop running the X air app (it also works well with the XTouch controller).
I then use the router WiFi with the Xair app on a tablet so I can walk around the venue to check and adjust the sound.
If I want to record the gig, I will take a other laptop and put it near the XR18 connected by USB (so somewhere on the stage or just off-stage), running Linux and Ardour. That way I can record everything into separate channels for later mixing.
One of the bands I used to do sound for moved to IEMs and a silent stage setup a couple of years back. They have the Behringer personal monitor system which enables them to have their own mixes. This connects to the XR18 via a cat 5 cable which daisy-chains between the units.
do you know if the xair app requires google services? my phones and tablets have lineageos without google anything, and I have been avoiding stage boxes and tablet run stuff because most of it requires a visit to the play store or some google firebase api that I dont have installed
thanks for the suggestion. its either that berhinger stagebox or the presonus which is also has onboard SD/xcsd recording.
I looked at and am really attracted to the zoom L20 too cause it’s cheap and does the 96000 which gets that extra air band I really like in my recording. it’s one of the most appealing to me because it’s all self contained, and I can edit in whatever I want in post, and I’ve really liked my h2n in the past and my h8 now that I use mainly for film making.
I don’t know for certain, but I would be very surprised if it did need Google services. It’s a self-contained, stand-alone app which has no need to communicate with anything outside your local network.
