M/S monitoring

[macula]

Hi all,

I will be using a stand-alone 2-channel recorder with no built-in MS decoding facilities. What are my options (inexpensive, max $300) for live decoding and monitoring on headphones? Any decent mixers with phase inverters, or any headphone decoders in that price range?

Unfortunately, I cannot find a reasonably priced stand-alone MS decoder. The MS38 Lite, among the few options I found, has been discontinued.

Scott Dorsey once wrote the following in a forum:

You can make your own [headphone decoder] without too much work.
If you're willing to hack up a pair of headphones so you have seperate grounds from each can, you
can just do it with a resistive network. One can is bridged between the
two signal pins, the other can is connected to ground on one side, and
on the other side through two 100 ohm resistors, one to each signal pin.
So the sum of the L+R and L-R is in one can, and the difference between
the L+R and L-R is in the other.
If you don't want to hack the headphones up, you can use a couple
transformers.

Does this make sense to you? I am not an electronics geek, so I cannot evaluate this procedure. Does it seem realistic? Would it sound good?

[audiothings]

sowter makes a transformer for your application. (Price: £17.93). go to their site and search for "8392". it'd be easy for any tech guy to put it together for you with the help of the provided schematic.

[just.sounds]

You might want to check if this is at headphone level without distortion.

[edit] It is :-) !