Mercenary Audio - Langevin HP-101 Studio Headphone Mixing System

Manley subtitles this unit "THE MORE ME BOX" because this is possibly its most important feature. Along with the typical cue mix or the control room mix, the engineer can offer each musician a fader dedicated to their own instrument. Experience teaches us that each musician always wants to hear more of themselves and that trying to meet this demand with several musicians and with too few aux sends is quite a mind bending challenge. As long as each musician's headphone is plugged into a separate station, each can have their own custom mix within arms reach. This frees up the engineer to concentrate on recording and getting the best sound and allows the producer to focus on performances because the musicians’ monitoring needs are met quickly and easily. It also frees up console aux sends so that they may be used for effect sends. With this station you will be able to offer musicians a better sounding headphone amp than most major studios and be able to provide some significant improvements over basic stereo cue boxes or any other headphone system we know of.

Langevin HP-101features

Each HP-101 station provides 8 x balanced inputs: four mono channels with FADER and PAN plus two stereo feeds with rotary switches providing stereo, mono and SIM processing. This cool SIM setting monos the bass which makes it sound more like listening to real speakers.

Channel one has a PHASE switch, intended primarily for the vocalist. Voice is heard through the bones in the head as well as the phones. You may not hear much difference switching the phase in the control room but the person at the mic certainly will. Polarity gets inverted all the time in studios which may explain why sometimes the vocal is so loud in the phones or sounds different on playback to the singer. Our PHASE switch sure does come in handy.

The 8 inputs appear on ELCO multi-connectors, wired to ADAT standard, making linking or daisy-chaining several stations easy.

The Mute controls the Power Amps directly and steps through ON, MUTE, LEFT MUTE and RIGHT MUTE then back to ON. Each station also has bass and treble EQ controls carefully optimized for headphones. The master stereo volume control feeds the built-in power amps which produce peak voltage (equivalent to) well over a hundred watts per channel to drive up to 4 headsets at any volume the musician may choose.

The two features that impress the musicians the most are the easy communication with one button and the fabulous sonic quality even at extreme levels. Ever clever, the ELCO connectors also provide pins used for several other communication and monitoring functions, including TALK and INTERRUPT.

SPECIFICATIONS

INPUTS:

All inputs on ELCO/EDAC 56-pin connectors 40Kohm input Z
Channels 1 - 4: Balanced line-level mono with 60 mm fader and pan pot
Channels 5 - 6: Balanced line-level stereo with 60 mm fader
switchable Mono, Stereo or Stereo Image Manipulation (SIM)
CMRR greater than 70dB with source Z< 150 ohm

HEADPHONE OUTPUTS:

Four 1/4" stereo headphone jacks connected in parallel
Peak to peak voltage: typically 50 volts into 100 ohms
Power output: 3 watts RMS into any load from 4 to 100 ohms
Output impedance less than 0.1 ohm
Built-in protection against overvoltage, undervoltage, overloads, shorts to the supplies or outputs, thermal runaway, and most other catastrophes.
No power-down / power-up thumps, pops, or DC
Multi-mode MUTE button ("panic button")
THD + Noise: < .03% (-70dB)
Tone controls > +/- 12 dB @ 100 ohms & 10 Kohms (gentle slope)

COMMUNICATION:

Multimode TALKBACK. "TALK" over music, "INTerrupt" kills music
DC control voltage enables individual stations to receive TalkBack signal
Built in MIC and TALK button, 2 LEDs show TalkBack mode
MIC and SWITCHED MIC signal available via ELCO input
Optional Mic Stand Adapter available.
Dedicated external PSU per station. Power consumption (120/240VAC): 13 watts
Dimensions: 11 1/4" x 7 3/4" x 2 1/2"

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