Little Labs MONOTOR, Operator'S Manual

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.