I bought this thing a while ago because I was starting to get into recording a bit more, and wanted to be able to record small groups with multiple people recording at once. To do that properly, you need to have a headphone amp or enough headphone outputs that everyone can listen in to what they are overdubbing and also to hear eachother. For the money this thing is unbeatable. Samson always delivers amazing value, even though their products aren't the best. For 50 dollars you get the ability to have 5 stereo headphone outputs coming from one single stereo input. The connectors are all standard 1/4" audio cables, so make sure you have headphones with this larger connector type, or that they have converter tips which you can pick up very cheaply at your local electronics store. There is a separate volume knob for each one of the headphone outputs, which is very nice since people want to be able to set their own levels. In addition to that, there is also a control for the stereo input level. This is handy if you want to turn everyone up or down all at once. It also has a mono summing feature, although I will say that I have never really found a use for that. Maybe if you have a pair of headphones with one ear broken, that would come in handy. The sound quality on the headphone channels is definitely kind of noisy and a little bit degraded. These are not top quality signal paths. However since these are probably only used for monitoring, it's doubtful that that really matters. For $50, it's hard to go wrong too. Good value even though the headphones sound a little dirty. I've since upgraded this piece of gear but it served me well while I had it.