Xvive More You

Xvive’s ingenious modular interface puts foldback in the hands of the performers.

The Xvive More You is one of those rare finds: an audio interface with a unique feature. It has the uncommon ability to expand and daisy‑chain itself into a whole band’s worth of personal monitoring and recording. While the name may make it feel playful and toy‑like, the reality of the system is far from it, and the more you get into it, the more problems it appears to solve.

The More You is about collaboration, and it manages to remove a lot of the stress and chaos you often find around recording and rehearsing with other people. It’s perfect for ad hoc situations or home and project studios that don’t have much hard‑wired in.

DAW Recording Scenario

Typically, when you want to record with a few musicians into a DAW, you’ll have one audio interface that everyone has to go through. There will be lots of cables dragging about the place, you’ll be fighting over headphone sockets, and only one person can really see what’s going on. It tends to feel fraught and fussy and can be more about getting things to work than making music together.

The More You system releases that tension by pushing the audio interface out into your room. Starting with the two‑in/two‑out Hub, you chain together up to eight More You Hubs, or the simpler two‑channel 2X units, so that everyone has one. Your guitarist, bassist and vocalist all have their own connections, right next to them, in a little box, with a pair of inputs, controls and headphone sockets. The main Hub is still the primary interface handling all the input gains and level control, but you can use the Mix knobs on your own box to blend your input with the mix locally in your headphones, which is really all a musician is interested in. The other knobs add reverb per channel, again locally. The brilliant thing is that neither of these affects the mix or what anyone else hears. So, your singer can drown themselves in reverb, and the guitarist can make their monitoring all about them, and no‑one else has to care.

As for the actual recording, the Hub supports up to 24 inputs; two of its own on the front with combi XLR connections and an ADAT port on the back for eight additional inputs. The remaining 14 inputs can come from any combination of Hubs or 2X boxes.

The boxes connect via a regular XLR cable plugged into a digital port that carries power and multiple channels of digital audio. They daisy‑chain from one box to another rather than spanning out from a single box, which can massively reduce clutter and tangles. With a maximum cable length of 25 feet you can occupy quite a large space.

You can daisy‑chain up to eight More You Hubs or 2X expanders using the XLR ports on the back of each unit.

The system works like a shared bus, so no additional latency is added when you connect another box. Audio arrives at each 2X box within one sample cycle, and if they’re all set to direct monitoring, then there will be no appreciable latency. Like any audio interface, if you want to monitor through the DAW, which you can choose to do with any input, then there will be the usual round‑trip latency. Still, I had it working down to a couple of milliseconds without...