The modern recording studio owes a lot to the headphone.

Almost every record produced in the modern era will have had some sort of overdubbing done on it - the musician will hear an already recorded sound played back to them, they will play along to it and record a new sound on an adjacent track.

Headphones are simple designs but without them overdubbing audio would be almost impossible.

If you play back a previously recorded sound through speakers, the microphone will pick it up, giving you unwanted bleed.

In the past sending a mix to an artist’s headphones in the studio could cause some problems.

Typically you were reliant on how many cue sends you had available to you on your mixing desk as to the number different headphone mixes you were able to make.

Imagine if you had four musicians playing together in the studio each of whom would like to hear more of themselves in their headphones and less of the other musicians but your desk only has 3 cue sends. That would be enough to cause the engineer a headache or two.

Thankfully these days there are devices which are as much help to an engineer as they are to a musician and allow each musician to make their own headphone mix.

No longer does the singer have to be embarrassed to ask the engineer to turn the bass player down for example.

This Furman HDS6 is not the most elaborate personal monitor system, it has one stereo channel and 4 mono channels which provide plenty of scope to give the artist a comfortable headphone mix. This means the engineer can concentrate on the recording and the artist can focus on being creative.