Monitoring with Multiple Headphones
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Why Use Multiple Headphones?
There are two reasons why you need to monitor a recording session with Multiple Headphones.
Personal Mixes
Sometimes in a live session, a musician playing a quieter instrument next to a loud instrument, for instance and acoustic guitar next to an electric guitar, will have trouble hearing themselves. This can degrade their performance and frustrate the musician. Giving every musician their own set of headphones can allow the engineer to send Personalized mixes to each musician, helping them to hear themselves.
Sound Isolation on a Mutli-Track Mix
With the advent of multi-track recording came the need for multiple headphones to help facilitate sound isolation. Often one or more of the musicians will use a DI (Direct In) while another may play a live instrument into a microphone. Playing the mix back to the musicians on a loud speaker, while allowing the musicians using the DI to hear themselves, may cause the DI instruments to 'leak' or 'bleed' onto the miked track. Giving each musician their own headphones prevents this bleeding.
Necessary Equipment
First of all, multiple headphones are necessary. Keep in mind that the better sound isolation the headphones provide, the more effective they will be for monitoring.
Multiple Headphone Amps, Headphone Distributor, or a Headphone Mixer are needed to send the audio to multiple headphones.
Headphone Amps
Headphone amplifiers allow you to connect stereo line outs to Headphones. Buying multiple Headphone amps allows a setup in which different line outs can send different mixes to different headphones. This is a great way to Personalize mixes for musicians so they can hear themselves.
Many Headphone Amps are also Headphone Distributors.
Headphone Distributors
A Headphone Distributor is a headphone amp that routes a stereo signal to multiple channels. Headphones can then be plugged into each channel. Every channel receives the same stereo mix.
Headphone Mixer
A headphone mixer has multiple headphone amps, but instead of a stereo line in, it has multiple line ins which are then mixed down to stereo for each headphone track. Some systems even use Ethernet Cables into 3-6 channel mixers that can control parts of the mix for each musician.
The Advantage of a headphone mixer is that it allows easy adjustment of the levels going to each headphone individually, without relying on DAW software and hardware to create these mixes.
Mackie's HMX56 Six Channel Headphone Mixer
External Links
SweetWater.com's collection of Headphone Amps and Distributors
