Headphone Monitoring Idea

[darwin]

What do you guys think of this idea? I want to give 3 musicians independent control over their headphone mix. The musicians will be located in 3 different places. I'd like them to have volume control over a stereo drum mix, stereo guitar, mono bass, and mono vox. I'm trying to spend as little as possible without compromising significantly on the sound and flexibility that the musicians get. So, here's my idea:

Out of the analog mixer, I will send 6 balanced aux sends into a balanced patchbay that is in the control room. This patch bay will be set up such that I can mult each aux send. The mult will allow me to distribute each send to two different locations.

The first location will be the vocal booth that is in a room directly above the control room about 20 feet away. The 6 sends will travel the 20 feet of balanced, mogami cable, and are ultimately plugged into a small mixer that has balanced inputs (either Soundcraft's Spirit Notepad or Yamaha's MG/102). This accomplishes the headphone balance for the vocalist.

The second location will be the drum room. In this room, there will be two musicians playing (guitarist and drummer). The guitarist's amp will be isolated in an adjacent closet, and the guitarist is in the room with the drummer. The 6 sends will reach this room via approximately 50 feet of balanced, mogami instrument cable. Those 6 sends are then inserted into another balanced and multed patchbay. One half of the multed sends will go to the drummer's personal mixer, and the other half will go to the guitarist.

Even though I'm using balanced connections, I'm unsure about what impact the level of multing will have on sound quality. Since these mixers are $100, this would be a pretty cheap experiment to run, but I'd be interested in hearing what your thoughts are about this. I figure it would run me about $400 for 3 mixers and 1 patch bay.

[tINY]

Hear Technologies Hear Back Four Pack | Sweetwater.com


Unless you already have all the cabling and so on - this might be a better way to go...



-tINY

[cojo67]

How exactly does this "hearback" system work?

I am running a MOTU 24 I/O with a PCIe card. How would I hook these together and how does it work?

Optical, ADAT, etc?

I am REALLY green on this sort of thing (and don't really know how the ADAT or optical outputs work) but if I had either one of those feeding the "hub" of the hearback would it have EACH channel of outputs available to mix on each "mixing station."

Sorry, I just really don't understand how these work.

[TornadoTed]

I thought about doing something similar with this,

THE T.MIX MIX 1204 FX - U.K. International Cyberstore

So they could even have reverb on their vocals if they wanted. In the end though my tech and I have designed a system ourselves from scratch. There has been a fair bit of R&D and prototyping but we are getting close to the end. It will have,

6 mono inputs with pan
1 stereo input
Talback mic with level control
Class A headphone amp, loud!
Intergrated stand, 2 heights for standing and seated musicians.

I am using these to split 8 outs from the console 4 ways, maybe you could use something similar too??? They sound just fine, I will open one up all the same and see if there is anything that can be upgraded and improved. I looked into building a splitter but you could barely buy the XLR's for the price of the whole unit!

MILLENIUM SP 8 SPLITTER - U.K. International Cyberstore

We have a prototype built which sounds really good and I hope to have the whole system built and up and running in a few weeks. At the moment I am building 4 mixers but it would be easy to expand the system to 8 with 4 more mixers and 4 more Millenium splitters.

[tINY]

Originally Posted by cojo67

How exactly does this "hearback" system work?

I am running a MOTU 24 I/O with a PCIe card. How would I hook these together and how does it work?

... if I had either one of those feeding the "hub" of the hearback would it have EACH channel of outputs available to mix on each "mixing station."

Think of it like a matrix mixer (if you know what that is). You put 8 channels into the hub (a single ADAT optical link can be used). Then, you hook up to 8 mixers up to the hub using cat5 wire. Each of the mixers can blend the 8 channels + a local channel into the headphones that are plugged into it.

So, mix the 8 channels (say drums, vox, Gtr, and playback) and send them to the hub, then each player can create his own mix from those channels. They can hear what they need and everyone can hear something different.

Lots of times, there is only 1 or 2 mixes and everyone in the studio has to listen to one or those mixes (and nobody likes the guitar as loud as the guitarist does...).



-tINY

[cojo67]

Tiny-
Maybe you can help me one more time here... (or anyone else who knows about these things)

The two pieces of gear that I have are an OLD 828 and a new 24I/O. The 24 does not have a ADAT or optical output on it, so I guess I would have to actually use analog outs into the "hear back." BUT the old 828 does have an optical out, so I could try to hook it up to the PCI-e card for the 24 I/O and use it for monitoring outputs, BUT I am concerned that going into the computer, out to the MOTU 828, then into "Hear back" would create a bad latency. Right now I don't have a latency problem because I have the inputs into my 24 I/O routed directly into the outputs of the 24 I/O, but I worried about that changing.

Any suggestions on how I could run my system if I bought this system. Would there be any other systems that would suit my set up better?

Thanks

[imixrecords]

Furman makes a decent system that is affordable

Mytek makes a decent system that is expensive

I've used both Mytek sounds better to me but the Furman works great and i've never had anyone complain about it.