Hi All, In my current studio setup I alternate between using headphones and loudspeakers. When using headphones I like to use room simulation and frequency correction software. Something that I find is that it’s very easy to forget that the headphone correction software is in the monitor chain when switching to the loudspeakers - this has caught me out more than once! I was thinking that one solution for this would be to have more than one monitor section - would this be possible? Does anyone else think that this would be a useful feature?
Use a bus that is fed from the master bus, this is almost what the monitor bus is. Feed the headphones from the monitor section, and the speakers from the bus.
Ok sorry, have a little more time now (Was on my phone above) so wanted to expand and provide a slightly better option:
Effectively the monitor section is a bus, but with a few extra abilities. That being said, as I mentioned above, you can emulate it by creating an Aux bus and having it fed from the master (Or even the monitor) section.
If feeding from the master section you have two options:
Use a single additional aux bus, and have this feed either the headphone or speaker, and the monitor bus feed the other
Use two additional aux busses, both fed from master, one would feed headphones, one would feed monitor. Put processing for the headphones and speakers on the Aux busses only.
The downside of feeding from the Master Bus, is that some controls on the Monitor Bus like the Mono switch, etc. as well as solos will not affect it. This could be an upside depending on the situation, but in your case that doesn’t seem to be the case, so another option:
Create 2 aux busses, and have them fed from the MONITOR bus. Put your processing for speakers and/or headphones on the Aux busses ONLY as appropriate much like above. In this case because it is fed from the monitor bus, things like Solo, and Mono on the monitor console will affect it.
In any of these cases make sure that the created busses are solo isolated, via the button above the solo control. That way soloing other tracks does not mute these busses.
Just due to a question on IRC I will clarify one additional thing, when I say route FROM the monitor bus, or FROM the master bus, I am meaning literally connect the outputs of those busses, NOT create a send from those busses. Minor point of terminology clarification there.
There are various problems with this approach. Each Bus always feeds the monitor section (used for A/PFL). This can lead to feedback.
Also if the custom normal Bus has a different playback latency than the monitor-bus, latency compensation is no longer possible. Avoid direct one to may connections, and prefer sends whenever possible.
For personal monitoring (headphones), Ardour provides Foldback Busses.