Little Labs MONOTOR, Operator'S Manual

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would get by often un-noticed in the studio control room environment.
This allowed a final polish to be put on a mix, with the engineer confident
that no matter what system it was played on by the consumer, all that
would be heard would be what was intended.
Fast forward to 2016, a much different recording monitoring environment
is the norm, often makeshift and acoustically imperfect. Despite huge
quality improvements in digital technology, the monitoring environment
has, in most cases, become less than ideal and resolution has suffered.
The Little Labs MONOTOR was designed so two people per MONOTOR
(each headphone out is independently powered) could listen deep into a
track at the highest resolution possible when paired with a quality set of
headphones.
The headphone amp in the pro world has been neglected with few offerings,
most of it junk, or the more expensive stuff available includes the gimmick
cross feed circuitry, and quite often is driven by several active stages with
unsuitable output drivers, great for old consoles to get a guitar sound, but
not for driving high resolution headphones.
Many audiophile headphone amps exist with often euphonic yet inaccurate
reproduction, and at a ridiculous price. A trend of digital to analog
converters combined with headphone amps is also popular. Some of the
digital to analog converters are of decent quality, but typically a studio
or mastering facility will have much better digital to analog converters in
house (the MONOTOR makes evaluating converters easy).
The USB powered headphone amp/digital to analog converters are
crippled by default by use of dc to dc converters used to squeeze every
bit of power out of a usb port.
Internally powered headphones and bluetooth headphones are also crippled
by a neutered power supply.