I’ve whinged before that my ears are naff. I often use headphones to help but now with so many radios it’s a pain, especially when the relevant socket is on the rear of the rig.
Ages back I set up a mini-recording studio to help the kids with their music lessons and practice. Guess what, I have a mixer as part of this and yet left it sat on a shelf forgotten! No prizes for guessing where it is now.
So, I can now mix in all the radios and the PC / SDR and output to headphones or speakers or both. It has two channels so I can play one radio through one speaker and another through the other which is useful. The same goes with output to the headphones but this is less useful because my hearing is so far down on one side that I play everything through my ‘better’ ear. But it gives a lot of flexibility.
One thing I am toying with getting is a decent audio processor. I had a Datong unit which I sold on but that was before the current DSP offerings. Again, the mixer will be useful because it has an FX channel, meaning I could send audio from one rig out through a DSP processor and back into the mixer all without having to fiddle with plugs.
Now if I could just tidy up all the wires…