Studio headphones

jeff5xo

jeff5xo

New member
I have a quick question I am currently building a studio in my basement. Framing, electric, and rock wool is done. I have put electic boxes (square plastic blue) in my control room, tracking room, and vocal booth. Inside these boxes I have ran 18 guage speaker wire, from control room to vocal room, and then from control room to tracking room.(control room has to blue electric junction boxes. Now my intent is to solder head phone jacks to these wires and screw the head phone jacks to cover plates.(the same type that you would use for a cable tv outlet). Then I want to come out of my head phone amp with a stereo chord and plug it into one of the jacks in the control room and plug the head phone into the wall jack corresponding with each room. Does that make sense????? Will this work. Basically what I'm trying to do is put jacks in the wall so I don't have to string cords through out my studio. It's just a way to keep things "behind the scenes". Will it work? :confused:
 
Jeff, electrically the only possible problem might be loading down one output with multiple sets of headphones - if you intend to use more than 1 set of cans at a time, you should run independent jacks and wires to each destination, and then hook up one separate output from your headphone amp to each jack in the CR, ditto on the other end.

If your amp is well made, you might not be able to damage it by using more than one headphone per output; you will, however, cut WAY down on the available volume for each additional set of phones you connect. That's why I recommend keeping to one output, one input. Also, phones come in all different impedances - lower impedance is more common in some phones lately, because it allows more current to flow in the headphone transducers; more current means more power, so the phones can be louder with some of the "pro-sumer" headphone jacks. However, too much current draw from an amplifier can "let the smoke out", so be careful.

Acoustically, the very least you need to do (if you want to maintain the isolation you would get) is to find a way to smear a heavy coat of caulk over the entire surface of your boxes - better would be if you can find what are called "putty packs", and spread those over the box surface. The goal is to build up the mass of the box and SEAL it in order to minimise acoustic transmission through that weakened area. If neither side of the wall is paneled yet, and you can get to the back of boxes before the other wall leaf is up, you can install the boxes and THEN seal them - otherwise, you may need to use other tricks to accomplish the same goal, which is a heavier, totally sealed box (including the hole where your wire(s) come through.

Hope that helped... Steve
 
If you need to power more than one set of cans the best thing to do is get a headphones mixer. You can get a unit just for that but most home recorders just use an old mixer that they have outgrown or picked up from ebay.
 
Ok, I didn't explain too clearly. My "amp" is an 8 channel headphone mixer(rackmount) I think it's made by Behringer. I want to use 1 channel for 1 set of headphones in the tracking room, and then channel 2 for 1 set of headphones in the vocal room. Does that make it clearer? Thanks for the link to the parts place, I will definately get those cover plates instead. Is 18 guage speaker wire going to work for this? Steve, I was so happy to see you comment on this. From reading alot of your posts, I have gained a tremendous amount of respect for you and your opinions.
 
Innovations,

You bring up an interesting point I've been pondering lately. I built one of the Paia headphone amps that I've been using for about a year but the last band I had complained about the distortion levels, so I checked it a bit more thoroughly than I had when I built it. Lo and behold, anything with any bass at all just sounds like crap. Now, the headphone feeds from my Mackie 32x8 console sound great, but there are only 2 of them and I've been trying to come up with an alternative solution for headphone distribution (without buying another distribution amp - I have a moratorium on studio expenses right now). How would you use a separate mixer to provide feeds for 4 or 5 sets of headphones? I've thought about using the sub-groups on the Mackie, but I'll have to build up special cables to get the L/R signals into a single jack for the phones. I've got a couple of smaller mixers (a [cough] Behringer 602 and a Tascam 1516??) that get used for various duties occasionally, but if they would work for headphones I'd dedicate one of them to that purpose. I'm just in need of some ideas.

Thanks,
Darryl.....
 
I just re-read your comment Steve. I didn't even think about acoustically treating the boxes...............wow what a HUGE error that would've been. I've been so excited about moving to the drywall phase, I didn't even think about that. I also have 2 electric outlets on the wall parallel to the control room. Do the same thing with them? Let me run this by you real quick. I won't get in too depth with my studio plans, but I sit facing the window looking into the tracking room. The control side is 2x4 constructed, with rock wool in the cavities. Then there is 18" of air space(yes I said 18".........I had to, don't ask.) then the tracking room wall 2x4 constructed (studs off center from control room wall) with rock wool in the cavities. I told you all of that just to give you a visual. Now I knoe the right way to get cords from control room to tracking room is to put an input/output panel (don't know what they're called) on each side wired together, BUT I don't have the money to do this right now. Is it acceptable, and don't yell at me, to run a 3" pvc pipe through the wall, run the chords through it, and stuff it with rock wool.............ok now you can yell at me and tell me how wrong thi is and how much stc I will lose! LOL. Ok, what other alternatives do I have?????
 
jeff5xo said:
Now I knoe the right way to get cords from control room to tracking room is to put an input/output panel (don't know what they're called) on each side wired together, BUT I don't have the money to do this right now. Is it acceptable, and don't yell at me, to run a 3" pvc pipe through the wall, run the chords through it, and stuff it with rock wool.............ok now you can yell at me and tell me how wrong thi is and how much stc I will lose! LOL. Ok, what other alternatives do I have?????
Click to expand...

I don't use jboxes for audio cabling. That way I can make much smaller holes in the drywall. Or use a jbox, but mount it flush against the stud, and cut a smaller hole in the drywall.

Speaker wire is OK, you might get a little noise but it's just tracking phones. 18 gauge is overkill for headphones.

Instead, my preference is to use 22 gauge shielded mic cable.
 
That's a good idea for the wires. I will make the junction boxes flush with the studs and make hole in drywall for wires. Where can I get 22 gauge shielded wire?? Radio Shack, or do I have to order it from somewhere?? Thanks mshilarious!
 
jeff5xo said:
That's a good idea for the wires. I will make the junction boxes flush with the studs and make hole in drywall for wires. Where can I get 22 gauge shielded wire?? Radio Shack, or do I have to order it from somewhere?? Thanks mshilarious!
Click to expand...

Well, I use partsexpress for that too, but there are other sources, you'll probably get some more recommendations. It's about $0.40 per foot.
 
Actually, 18 gauge might be exactly what you need if you have any phones that are low impedance so they're louder - for example, 50 foot runs of #18 are minimum recommended if you're looking for a damping factor of at least 50 with an impedance of 50 ohms - in addition, the heavier wire is more durable and isn't all that much more expensive, especially compared to having to replace it when it gets damaged -

Higher damping factors (larger wire, lower impedance amp outputs relative to driven element) are what helps tighten up bass response in speakers, although I've not played with this as far as headphones are concerned, it might not be as noticeable.

If you don't ever expect to have lower impedance headphones (a lot of them are around 150 ohms), then MS's recommendations are fine - personally, though, I prefer doing things a bit overkill to just doing them over... Steve
 
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