Behringer Powerplay Pro-8 HA8000

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've been using this headphone amp for about one year now. It's a single rack mounted unit, so it's convenient to set up at the studio and keep it there, or to put it in a mobile rack if you do on-location recording. You can use up to 8 sets of headphones on this unit, which is more than most would need. Each channel has its own volume control, plus a master volume control for the 2 mixes it can use. They can get very loud! Be careful when setting your levels - you could blow out your headphones and ear drums. Each channel also has a mono switch, and a toggle switch to use either mix 1 or mix 2 coming into the amp. Another convenience is that you can insert your headphones into the front or rear of the amp, which cuts down a bit on cable tangling. I will say however that this headphone amp is quite noisy as you crank it up. You start to hear a lot of crackle and hum at high volumes, and it seems to increase as the channel numbers increase. So the first headphone insert is fairly quiet, but the 8th one is a lot noisier. However, as most will usually only be using the first maybe four or 5 at a time, it's not as important. And truthfully, even when it's noisy you can still hear the program material pretty well, so all but the fussiest of musicians will probably be fine with the way their headphones sound. This unit is quite cheap, as with most Behringer products. While the noise is a little disconcerting, it's still a great value, and unless you're super picky about noise when you're monitoring, you should find it a great value as well. I'd buy it again.