"Step Down" for headphones

[jstegeman]

Hi everyone,

At our church, we have a sound board at the back of the room, snake on the platform for running mics/instruments. There is a power amplifier for the house speakers and a monitor amplifier for stage monitors, both at the back of the room - the monitor feeds run up through the snake, and we have the small monitors on stands. This all works OK.

The issue we have, well let's say the topic of this post - as we have multiple issues , is for our drummer. He is hard of hearing and can have trouble hearing the monitor. Yesterday, we played with a completely different setup with a mixer near the drum kit into a Bose line array system - he was still having issues, but since the mixer was near him, I popped a set of can headphones on the headset out of the mixer, and voila - he was pleased as punch.

That setup, however, is for a one-time thing - we can't run that setup at a church service. If I plugged the headphones into one of the chained monitor plugs, I'm guessing that I'd blow the headphones, as it's being run from the power amplifier. Is there any kind of device that would take the powered signal from the stage monitors down to headphone level so that I could plug him in that way? Yes, I know about wireless IEMs, and that may be in the future, but I'm looking for something low budget to get started...

Thanks,

John

[gotglade]

I've recently been researching this for our worship team as well. The only thing I've found that's designed for this situation (powered monitor feed at speaker level -> Headphones) is the Radial H Amp and it looks like they don't make them any more so you'd have to find it used.

However, if you can find a convenient way to convert the speaker level to line level (GOOGLE SEARCH) like an In-Line Pad or some kind of DI box that can accept pad down speaker level (AR-133), then you can easily run the signal into something like THIS or THIS or THIS and you'd be all set.

Alternatively, if you have inputs on your snake you aren't using and an extra pre-fade aux mix / you're willing to SPLIT one of your monitor signals before it hits the amp; You could get him his own mix / a copy of what's going to the monitors. You then plug that out into the unused snake input and use it as a send to any of the monitoring systems I listed above (or similar products) on the stage.

So:

Unused Pre-fade Aux -> Snake -> Headphone Amp
-or-
Monitor Aux -> Split 6 -> Snake -> Headphone Amp (with another split from the Split 6 going to the monitor amp).

Just know to be very careful with the signal from the Amps currently powering your monitors (speaker-level) as it can easily fry anything that isn't built to handle it.
Most headphone amps built for stage monitoring are made for line-level inputs.

Hope that helps a bit!

G

p.s. I'm assuming your monitors are passive as you mentioned the amp before them. Forgive me if I'm mistaken.