John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

After looking and searching, I still am unsure of what to use so here goes...

I need to make about 12 headphone runs.
My first choice is to have the headphone amps in the control area with me and send powered headphone feeds to wall plates (so people dont have to get up and adjust volumes). I generally only use mono headphone mixes if that helps but stereo runs are fine. What type of wiring would be best for longer runs? (50 foot)

If this a bad idea, my second choice would be to run a line level run down a balanced cable and simply put the headphone amps in the rooms with the musicians. It is just easier sometime to make the volume adjustments from my location while they are playing.

Thanks,
Tom

Tom,

Do you need 12 headphone connections or 12 separate headphone/cue mixes?

I need 12 different headphone connections.
I have the capability of running 4 different headphone mixes, but generally I only run 1 mix unless people complain.
I have 2 headphone amps (one six channel and one four channel) chained together but I can actually run them as 10 seperate channels.

Anyway, to get back to the point. Currently in my small studio (about 200 sq /ft) , my mix area is open to the tracking area I simply run long headphone extensions to where people are set up. But in the new studio (about 950 sq/ft) there are long enough runs I want to put the headphone extensions in the walls.

I hope that makes sense.
basically I want to run 10 to 14 headphone runs from the amps I have chained together. ( I am buying another 4 to 6 channel amp)

Eventually I want to run seperate mixes for the drum room, the main room and the vocal booth, but for now a single mix is fine.

Let's make this easy.

What you need...in order of signal flow...
From console (or other send) to Power Amp.
From Power Amp you can run a mic cable or other multi-conductor cable to each room. Use an XLR jack Male (opposite of a mic input so someone doesn't plug into the wrong jack). Number of pins depends on the number of cue mixes you want possible. You can get 2 mono sends or one stereo send from a 3 pin XLR. The nice thing about the 3 pin, you can just use a mic cable to plug in the headphone boxes.
Now, you need some headphone/cue boxes. Let the musicians control their own "master" volume. The only adjustments you as the engineer need to do is adjust how much "more me" they want from the aux sends.

If you need more info or a wiring scheme l'll try and give more details.

Aaron,
Thanks!
That sounds good. I understand what you are saying.
I was not sure how mic cabling stood up to the 1 watt or so that the headphone amps sometimes put out. I figure the mic cables are good for line level anyway.