Increasing the number of head phones you can use per head phone channel?!

eckertone

New member
Hey guys!

I have a quick question on head phone channels on interfaces. I use the Behringer UMC 1822 btw.
So my band and I want to track a song live in the rehearsal space and we need 4 head phones. The interface only has two head phone channels though. So we thought about using a y-shaped splitter (sorry, dont know the correct term in english :D) for each of the channels so we can have 4 head phones and dont need to buy a preamp for that.
Is there any reason why we couldnt do that?

Thanks for the advice!
 
Using a simple Y-cable splitter might work, but there are good reasons to use an actual headphone amp.

Having separate volume control for all the headphones is the pretty obvious benefit. That becomes even more important if you're using different headphones. Connecting two different kinds of headphones to one output is fairly likely to mean one is louder than the other.

There's going to be some limit to the number of headphones of a given type that can be connected to one output. In some cases that limit might be one set. Giving each set its own amplifier solves this problem.

Some headphone amplifiers have cool features, like making one output take its signal from only left or only right. That way you have the ability to give people different mixes using left as one mix and right as the other. As far as I can tell the 1820 (I didn't see an 1822) headphone outputs can be two independent stereo mixes. With the right cables you could have four independent mono mixes, which would be really handy with four band members. The Behringer HA4700 would get that done.
 
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