One of the spotlight features in the Collaborator is the built-in Talkback microphone with adjustable mic gain as well as a blend control to mix as much of that talkback audio into the headphone audio as desired. Talkback is a wonderful new feature that you'll wonder how you ever got along without it!

If you are out in the studio singing with others all on headphones with Talkback on, you will not have to remove your phones so you can hear someone else in the room who is not wearing headphones. When tracking loud guitars and drums with other musicians also on headphones connected to the Collaborator, it is wonderful to plug in a standard keyboard sustain pedal footswitch to talk the others hands-free. The Talkback mic can also serve as an ambient room mic.

Besides the footswitch/sustain pedal jack, Collaborator's rear panel has a pair of +4dBU line level XLR inputs as well as a 1/4-inch stereo input jack for patching a stereo feed from another cue system or the headphone jack on your USB interface. All inputs are calibrated but there are trim pots to set your own levels if they are low or imbalanced. The rear panel also has a 5-pin XLR that connects to the included in-line power supply.

Besides placing the Collaborator right on your desktop, out in the studio you can mount the Collaborator on a mic stand using the standard threaded mount built into the base of the unit and the (included) stand adapter. To keep it easy to move anywhere around the studio, I strapped the XLR cables and power supply cable to the stand and tie-wrapped the power supply to one of the legs of the stand's tripod.

I compared the Collaborator to my existing old-school cue system that uses a 100-watt per channel Hafler stereo amp driving (passive) Simons CB-4 headphone boxes. Both systems were fed the same level of stereo program from my Pro Tools interface and I found no big difference--although the Collaborator has more gain for super quiet audio. Once I got the playback level set the same for both by quickly plugging the same pair of headphones back and forth, I found no difference. I also found no problem driving low impedance phones such as my power hungry Audeze LCD-X magna planar models.

The Collaborator will go louder than loud and works great for drummers using any set of headphones. This is a great investment in your studio and I highly recommend them to everyone.

The Collaborator sells for $499 MSRP and you can buy on at the Fix Audio Designs online store at:

www.fixaudiostore.com/products/collaborator-high-definition-analog-headphone-monitor-amp-with-talkback www.fixaudiostore.com/