Setting up a good headphone mix

[nateman76]

I am trying to get a headphone mix set up using the mix bus but I am not sure how to rout each mix bus so they will send audio to a Presonus Firestudio multi outs. I want to have each mix bus as a custom mix for drums guitar ect. Has anyone here tried to do so? I am using MixBus V2.5 my interface is 2 Presonus Firestudios and the headphone amp is a Behringer Power Play Pro 8.

[madmaxmiller]

I am trying to get a headphone mix set up using the mix bus but I am not sure how to rout each mix bus so they will send audio to a Presonus Firestudio multi outs. I want to have each mix bus as a custom mix for drums guitar ect. Has anyone here tried to do so? I am using MixBus V2.5 my interface is 2 Presonus Firestudios and the headphone amp is a Behringer Power Play Pro 8.

If you are using Jack you should be able to connect the Mixbus outputs directly to your Firestudio DAW inputs, which you can patch in the Firestudio to the respective outputs which you patch (with a real wire haha) to your headphone amp.
However, please note that the mixbus sends are post fader, so if you move a fader this channel would be changed in all headphone mixes. Plus it can become a bit fumbly to work with the mixbus sends for headphone mixing...
One better way would be to create 1 pre fader external send per headphone mix in every channel and connect those sends directly to your Presonus ports, that doesn't need Jack nor is it dependent on the faders, it even gives you a little fader per headphone mix directly in the channel strip - thus you can see and mix much better than with the mixbus knobs. However, that has a big disadvantage, too: you can't pan the channels, so your talents will have mono mixes in their headphones.
Either way, you will have latency and if you can keep the buffers low enough totally depends on your hardware/software combination.

Having Firestudios myself, I know that they bring more or less extensive mixers onboard. The 26x26 for example lets you create 9 independent stereo mixes with a convenient mixer interface plus an extensive routing matrix.
The (USB) 1818VSL can do 4 mixes with Fat Channel processing, so you can add lots of reverb for the singer
I once had a Firestudio Project 1010 but don't remember what the Options were there... but I think there was some mixing in the Firestudio possible, too.
This to me seems the better way as it is nearly latency-free, allows processing and doesn't depend on the PC, which can in turn cleanly record without running out of DSP or I/O power.
Have you investigated into that?

Cheers,
MMM