Your Build Ideas - December 2015

The baby monitor/personal stereo combiner has another similar application in that if you are a camera operator you often need to be listening through headphones to the microphones connected to the camera as well as to headphones connected to a venue intercom headset as well. Being able to connect one set of headphones to both headphone outputs via a compact belt pack unit with some mixing/gating/ducking type control would be useful.

Another area where this type of headphone combining problem is encountered is in live streaming webcast production where you often need to be listening to the vision mixer console headphones but also have the ability to monitor the headphone/line output from laptops and various mobile devices in order to monitor the outgoing streams on test devices along with the intercom output. In this case you ideally want multiple stereo aux headphone/line level outputs mixed/switched in with the main console and intercom headphone outputs as above. In this scenario however it would also be useful to have visible audio monitoring of each aux input (variable brightness / tricolour LED) so that you can verify that there is an audio signal still there without having to repeatedly switch to each aux input in turn.

I used to do professional video and you are absolutely right. I think we used the audio mixer to send the audio feed we were recording through our ClearCom system and just kept it at a low level, so you could hear it, but then communication through the coms came in at a normal volume. It would have been pretty nice to have the live audio be at normal volume and just get lowered when someone was talking through the coms. That would also be really useful in theatre. Oh man, I would have loved to have had that as a stage manager.

I used to do professional video and you are absolutely right. I think we used the audio mixer to send the audio feed we were recording through our ClearCom system and just kept it at a low level, so you could hear it, but then communication through the coms came in at a normal volume. It would have been pretty nice to have the live audio be at normal volume and just get lowered when someone was talking through the coms. That would also be really useful in theatre. Oh man, I would have loved to have had that as a stage manager.

The higher end studio systems cameras tend to have intercom facilities built into the design so not an issue there, however if you are working with ENG type cameras on location then it is a common problem but one that there doesn't seem to be an off-the shelf solution for.

As a result you often see camera operators attempting to wear two different sets of headphones so you get camera audio in one ear and intercom in the other, but in reality both end up slipping off halfway through the filming...

As for the aux inputs scenario, then the RDL monitoring box is the closest I've found

RM-MP12A ‐ Audio Monitor Panel - 12 Line or Speaker Inputs

but it still doesn't have impedance matching specifically for headphone level signals, is only mono and doesn't have the audio ducking type functionality for the intercom. so 'close but no cigar...'