Headphone cable

[TomHoward]

Afternoon all

 

I have some headphone cable runs which are needed to run to remote rooms, basically tie lines for recording from the rooms are going in and will need tracking headphone returns.

 

We have some other similar installations which are standard multicore with amp'd headphone returns on some of the lines. In these cases the cable runs are around 10m. The new installations will be around 30-40m.

 

In practice is multicore suitable or should we be putting something more substantial in alongside the multicore lines? I can't really picture if there's any serious current in driving headphones.

 

Thanks in advance

[J Pearce]

My previous place used standard mic multi lines for the headphone returns, with 4 parallel sockets on each line. I never had any issue, even when we had over 16 headphones on the go.

Most professional headphones are over 60 ohms, so current is pretty low, but watch out for consumer and in ear headphones that often have impedances as low as 16 ohms.

[Bobbsy]

You'll probably find yourself popular with the performers if you run line level to the remote rooms then provide a headphone amp (or amps) there so each person has their own control over levels. Depending on your requirements, Behringer have headphone amps ranging from about £16 to a bit over £100.

 

I'll ignore the REALLY good systems that let people create their own mixes as likely being over budget! :)

[TomHoward]

We have individually ampd channels so each headphone is controllable but not in the room. This is running from an aux mixed system with talkback and everything so remote level control is viable as long as it could fit within the Neutrik D Box but remote mixed is not viable as we'd need to run all the audio channels down there just for headphone mixing. However I'd rather keep the additional setup the same as the existing so we will be most likely be adding a second multichannel headphone amp and run individual lines down there.

[BlueShift]

User regular mic cable, amp them in the machine room with a decent amp, and then run the amped lines down single mic cables, terminated in XLR, and bung these on the end for local control: http://fischer-amps.de/en/in-ear-monitoring/mini-body-pack-XLR-oder-klinken-eingang.html

 

Just a nice passive attenuator in a compact box

[TomHoward]

I had thought we could do some local passive attenuation, but in your post is also the crux of the issue - running amp'd headphones down single mic cables seems to be acceptable without any serious losses or problems.