Radial Studio-Q Desktop Cue Talkback Controller

OK, so, I usually buy from Sweetwater, but was in a huge hurry,l so I got it overnighted from Amazon. This thing... oh how I wish I'd had it before! I'd wanted a way to talk to the guys in 'the other room' in my 'home studio' (a dedicated control room, and my living room, LOL). I really didn't want to use a channel of A/D-D/A conversion for a mic going into my DAW, let alone deal with latency. i wanted a simple, robust talkback solution. And that's what I go. Easy to set up (but it did lose a star on this, for reasons I'll explain below) and super-easy (i.e. no-brainer) to use, it made for the smoothest recording session I've had since I moved from a hardware mixer with a dedicated mic (back in the days of tape) to a DAW. The genius of this simple solution is that you patch it in between your DAW and your headphone distribution system - i.e. it takes place totally in the analog domain, 'after the fact' of the DAW. Basically: stereo inputs from the DAW output to the Studio-Q, then stereo outputs from it to the headphone amp. Then, using the built-in mic (you can also connect an external one), you can talk to your musicians, setting both the mic gain and the level of 'dimming' (i.e. ducking) of the program material when you're talking. You can also attach a footswitch, and a 'beacon' - a light that goes off in the studio when you're talking. I needed neither of these. So... why the 1/2 star demerit? Will, at over $200.00, this units misses the mark a bit on inputs and outputs. It has two 1/4" female input jacks, and two 1/4" female output jacks but.. my ART Head Amp headphone distro-amp takes a single 1/4 TRS input plug, and I usually feed it straight out of my Coleman Audio MP3H monitor control system's 1/4" TRS headphone output. So: I had to buy L/R breakout cables to take a single stereo 1/4" TRS jack and convert it to left and right TS mono 1/4" jacks - in both directions! Radial is a very hip company: they make really good tools that work really well, and this is no exception. But: they usually really know how people are going to use them, and in this case, for a device DESIGNED to work with DAWs, they should have anticipated that some of us would have 1/4" stereo inputs and outputs in our monitoring/headphone setups: it's not unusual by any stretch of the imagination. This seems like an oddly out-of-character oversight on their part. But I'll forgive 'em! because it still got the job done and really revolutionized my little studio! No more running out the door to talk to the guys, no yelling out cues either.

This device is awesome. I use this for announcing sporting events. Push the button and music dims very well. Best thing I've bought for the PA booth! Rugged built and well worth the money!