Millenium HP4

The feature set is perfect, just what I was looking for to convert my small gig band from wedges to wired inear monitors. It has four stereo inputs and four headphone preamps. Each of the preamps can feed the signal from any of the four stereo inputs.

This is great as it allows me as an engineer to quickly listen other members mix without repatching anything, just turning the input selector. This is essential in a live situation.

Now, about these few issues...

The left and right inputs are backwards!
This was very puzzling at first. I connected everything by the book and the panning was backwards in our phones. At first I thought it was me doing something wrong on the mixer (X32) but after troubleshooting I found out that the inputs on the HP4 are indeed backwards. What's more interesting, it's not the labeling.
The first input is labeled as a left/mono input and when nothing is connected to the other input (labeled right) it does pass the signal as mono to both headphones. But that input is really the right input.

Or let me say it this way, I'm not sure if it is the inputs or headphone outputs that are reveresed, but if I connect the inputs backwards I get correct panning in the headphones.

It's no big deal in the end, not a deal breaker for sure, especially for the price. I did put a label on the back of the unit to remind me that the inputs should be connected backwards.

The other issue is that the inputs are not balanced. I have a wifi router mounted in the rack and we get some noise from it in the headphones. If I turn it off or remove it from the rack the noise disappears.

I was looking for a simple 4 way headphone amp, so this was perfect. Nothing fancy or unnecessarily complicated like the samson and behringer stuff, just a 'source select' and 'volume' control.

It works great - HOWEVER, one day a strong smell came from the Headphone amp... which I believed to be the smell of a capacitor blowing... and it stopped working.

To this day I am unsure of why or how this had happened (Thomann said they would investigate and tell me the problem, but never did) although they did send me a brand new replacement immediately, and they covered all the P+P costs.

The new unit is working great, and I am very pleased. I LOVE THOMANN!

I've decided to update my review of this product as it has developed some critical issues over time.

I purchased three of these over a period of a couple of years. Two of them have now developed an issue where the inputs fail one by one. The third one is still ok but has hardly been used, I got it only for a backup.

The failed inputs have developed LOUD distortion and have become useless. One of the units even had this problem straight out of the box on one of the inputs. Then the rest of the inputs followed one by one. It didn't happen all at the same time and not every input has failed yet. My first unit still has one working input, my second unit now has two working inputs and the third is still ok (but like I said, it has not been used much).

Four channels with four inputs may seem like an excellent deal at this price but unfortunately it seems to have a serious issue that makes fail gradually within a couple of years of sporadic use. I've not used them more than around 2-3 hours pr week on average.

Before the inputs failed the sound was allright. Not something I would use for mixing or casual listening, it is slightly noisy and sounds a bit harsh, but more than adequate for tracking/monitoring.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to last very long. Not recommended!

With this unit, you can send four individual cue mixes, unlike other similar boxes in this price range where you only can send one or two stereo mixes to the headphones. The headphone amps has enough power to work with both hi z and low z headphones and delivers a pretty good sound. Not the same detailed sound as in my Motu 1248 headphone amp, but good enough for cue mixes. There's enough info across the whole frequency spectrum for the musicians to get a feeling of what's going on. Build quality is pretty good, but lacks at little bit consistency; all the pots doesn't feel the same. But for the price they work more than ok. I've used it a lot for the last couple of years and have had no problems with it. In fact I will get one more unit because sometimes 4 headphone mixes aren't enough-