Behringer Headphone Amplifiers

Overall, The Powerplay Pro-8 HA8000 is a good choice for the thrify engineer who may perhaps be looking to get more serious about recording larger groups or groups that insist on playing together to capture a more "live" feel. With 8 available outputs the HA8000 should be able to handle most applications. For the price it is a solid value and performs as expected. Obviously, the 8 outputs is a key selling point. It's rare that you'll ever need more than that, unless you're trying to record a very large group of musicians at once. Two inputs allows for two seperate headphone mixes in mono or a single mix in stereo. I personally just use a single mono mix just to simplify things and keep the workflow going. Anyone who expects a recording phase headphone mix to sound perfectly like a final mixed product ready for mastering is being unrealistic. The overall quality of sound is what you would expect from Behringer, if not just a bit above. As long as you have all your gain staging set up properly the individual players will all have their own overall volume adjustment right there at their fingertips so it can actually; if you let the players control this stage themselves, save some time building a mix that everyone will be comfortable with. In my experience, the HA-8000 has been quite clean enough, static and crunch wise, and has plenty of headroom to really drive a set of phones if needed for a louder group or a heavy hitting drummer. Of course, your choice in headphones will significantly impact the overall quality of sound that your players recieve. I've used many different headphone amps over the years and I think that the HA8000 holds it's own well vs. some more expensive models. Behringer has stepped up their game over the years and they now are a reputable company in that they make solid "near pro" equiment at affordable prices. I reccomend the Powerplay Pro-8 HA8000 to anyone looking for a good solid headphone amp.

I got this headphone amp a couple years ago. I just wanted something simple to pump up the headphone levels I could get. My drummer was having a hard time hearing his headphone mix above his drums, and my sound card just didn't provide enough power to get it above the drums. So I picked this thing up, and to that end, it works great. It's not without its problems though. It definitely changes the sound of whatever you put through it, and not in a good way. Everything sounds kind of tinny and somehow fake on the other side of this amp. I am pretty sure they use low quality power amps that are very noisy. The signal you get on the other side has a much higher noise floor than what goes into it. Apart from this, it is conveniently sized at 1 rack unit, and has individual volume and mute controls for each of the 4 headphone channels it gives you. Though the signal is kind of dirty, you can get it very loud. In my case, that's really all I was looking for, so I let the signal degradation slide. The amp also gets very hot, so you'll want to give it an open space on either side in your rack for it be able to cool off without damaging other nearby racked equipment. It has worked very reliably, and none of the parts have worn out on me since I've had it. This is probably one of the cheapest 4 channel headphone amps you can buy, and if you are not really concerned with pristine audio quality for your monitoring and you just want loud headphones, it's a good value and will work well for you. If you want everything in your signal chain crystal clear at all times, this isn't the product for you. I would get it again, it works fine for me.