control room out vs headphone out for playback

[rockironwebb]

Just wondering if there is a difference in the headphone jack and the control room out jack? (ALESIS multimix 16 firewire). Due to lack of cables I had a male to two female 1/4in splitter hooked up to both a set of headphones and going to what I am currently using for playback for when the band is over (stereo system) I got a hold of some free cables that I can use. 1/8in L/R control room out to rca L/R in to stereo. I've tried it out and did not notice any difference between the two hook ups. Any reason why I should do one over the other?

 

[miroslav]

Probably no difference at all AFA the mix you are getting...though there may(?) be some difference in the signal strength, which may or may not come into play for you.

 

[Bobbsy]

From the Alesis spec:

Main Mix, Ctrl Room, Ext Aux Send Level: +4dBu nominal, +20dBu maximum

Headphone Output: 75 ohm output impedance
>105mW into 75 ohms
>40mW into 600ohms

....so the levels and output impedances are slightly different but probably not enough to cause any major issues for most gear. Not so much on the Alesis, but once you get to more professional mixers, they tend to feature things like automatic muting of the C/R speakers when you key a talkback mic.

What the Alesis does have is a routing option to feed the 2 track input directly to the Control Room monitor. In a typical recording situation, I'm not sure this is a great amount of use--but things have a habit of coming up to fill the options available!

 

[rockironwebb]

Thanx fellas. I will play around with both options to see if I would currently want one over the other.

 

[arcadeko]

I use the ctrl room out to go to my PA for rehearsal. The main mix goes to the monitors.

The ctrl room separate volume is handy for that.