Decent Sounds Quality, but Lacks some volume control and adds Whitenoise to a Line
"I use this to play with my church which has a mix of floor and wireless in-ear systems (not enough for the whole band), so for the cost of about $40 + the cost of IEMs I could have a personal IEM system to protect my hearing from the uncaged drums and this does come in handy for that, but does have some issues.
The first is that if you use it plugged in, you'll have a 60hz hum in your ears and down the line. What I mean by down the line is I connect this to my tuner pedal bypass line so I can have my bass in my IEMs without having to add it to our floor monitors with an XLR male to 1/4in convertor and if I used the AC adapter to power this, I'd have a 60 Hz hum, which would come through my bass amp and into the mains. Since I bought some 9v rechargeable batteries, I don't have a hum, but the white noise hiss we have in the system basically passes into my line and further out on my bass output line. Thankfully we have the highs on the bass cut so I'm not really adding to the white noise output, but it is annoying that it carries through on this thing even though it doesn't have a passthrough!
The second is that the battery compartment is just the right size for a 9v, so getting the batteries out requires a small flathead screwdriver, so I with the compartment was just a smidge bigger (like 1/16th in would have been more than enough to have the battery fall out when I want to take it out!).
The third is that it's impossible to balance a loud and a quiet line so I really can't hear my bass through the IEMs when the main monitor mix is coming through. It's really not a huge deal since my biggest reason for wanting this is for hearing protection and I can hear my bass through the subs easily enough (I'm 3 feet away from our left sub) it still would be nice to have more control over that. Now, once I do get more pedals for my bass and have better gain control (the bass itself is actually really quiet so this unit isn't completely at fault) it still would be nice to be able to mix left and right more such that I can actually hear both simultaneously without fully cutting out the main monitor mix.
Lastly, the max volume on this really isn't that loud. Like I have this at max always and it's not even that loud. Like, I think I'd have to listen to sound through it for like 5+ hours consecutively for me even to worry about this damaging my hearing which is good from that perspective, but I'd rather have the ability to turn this up even like 3-5dB more to get more oomph out of it, but again, with my pair of IEMs I can hear the things coming into the unit at a decent volume (darn my quiet bass!) just fine.
For all my complaining though, it actually works really well and most of the issues are actually external to the unit itself (besides the noise passthrough as this should only be outputting sound to the headphone jack!). I do wish it had mixed 1/4/XLR inputs for better handling instruments without 1/4 to XLR cables, but considering that cable cost me $5 and I know those input jacks are like $3-$5 a piece for the part itself so if I want to replace them later myself, it'll cost me like $10-15 vs the one cable it's not really a big deal.
I will say I have NO clue about the battery life of this thing. I use cheaper rechargeable 9v batteries and they've to die or even tell me my battery is low. I do recharge the 9v battery after most uses. Yes, I know it's not the best way to use a li-ion rechargeable, but I don't want this to die mid-set and not hear anything that well, so this definitely lasts quite long and if you use an alkaline 9v, you're likely to see this go maybe 7-8 hours of use before you need to change the battery, but if you use a rechargeable, I'd play it safe and recharge it more often as they tend to have less battery life than an alkaline and will have some phantom drain that an akaline isn't as susceptible to."
For the price can’t beat it
"Put this on my pedal board, and run a stereo aux to it. Got the Shure 215 buds and 10’ extension cable. Loomed it with my guitar cable.
Sounds fine, gets plenty loud, and stereo IEMs give me the mix I need."
