Hello... I'm a drummer of many years looking to invest in a decent monitoring system for live work. I'm a bit of a techcno-spaz which is why I hit things with sticks. Basically, I want my foldback to be 'in ear' and I am trying to find out exactly what I need to turn up to gigs with. Obviously my headphones, but I'm guessing some sort of headphone amp? If so, what will the venues need to provide in order for this to work? is it simply a case of the XLR (that usually goes into my monitor) just plugging into the headphone amp? or is it more complicated than that?

Would appreciate any help / advice on this.

Cheers!!

[coliam]

Hi rossage,

.... hmmm, this is interesting. You can't be certain what is going to be driving your headphone amp, can you ?
It might be a single-ended source or a balanced one. You might need both in that case.
Not an easy thing to find on a ready-made headphone amp. I suggest you take a look at a small mixer for this.
You'd then have balanced inputs and also single-ended inputs, and you'd also get a headphone monitor output.
You don't really need hi-fi for this, do you ? So a mixer would probably be O.K.
How about something like a Soundcraft Compact 4?
www.soundcraft.com

edit: You might also look at www.behringer.com.
There might be something in the 'mini' range that would work for you

Excellent! thanks for your help