At some point it became apparant that my headphone cables were not long enough for musicians recording in my live room. Since I didn't have any extra money to buy longer cables, I took an old Behringer patchbay PX3000 and bolted it backwards to the wall in the live room and ran, a 6' TRS snake to my headphone distribution amp (an SHA8) through the wall into the control room to the top inputs on the rear of the patchbay and the headphones patched out of the bottom of the patchbay.


I was only getting mono till I realized that I should use the front outputs of the SHA8. At that point I swear I was getting stereo in the phones, but I aven't had a band in here in a while and prepping for an incoming project, we discovered that we are only getting signal in one ear. Phones plugged directly into the front of the SHA8 are getting stereo, but if I plug them into the patchbay, one ear only. The patchbay rear inputs are normalled to the outputs which are where the headphones are plugged in.


I don't understand why this is, can anyone think of a reason or a solution?




- Joel

looking at an image of the unit, it seems to have "normal", "half-normal" and "thru" switches on top. Have you tried the "thru" setting? I assume you would have to unscrew it from the wall and use it "front to back". Because right now you have it mounted "face in"! I don't know why the "normal" is only giving you one side, but I bet the "thru" would work in a front-to-back configuration. They make wall rack things where it could be mounted to the wall 'face up' - that way you could get at both sides.

Since your wall is plywood and you obviously don't mind drilling into it, I would say you could even just screw a couple of pieces of scrap wood instead of that rack thing and mount it on those. Save yourself $20.

Another idea is to just get 8 female to female TRS 'barrel' adapters and get rid of the patch bay altogether. That's all you are using your patchbay for anyway: F-to-F.

What I did in a room I was consulting on was to advise them to put the headphone distribution amp itself into the live room. That's where there are the most people using headphones and they have easy access to their own volume controls and switching from the A mix and the B mix.

In the CR, you might only need one or two headphones at any one time so there is a justification for getting the headphone distribution box out into the live room.

....wall rack vertical mount: .................................. TRS female to female barrel adapters: