by Scott Helmke – TC Furlong Audio Engineer and Repair Tech
Here’s one of my favorite troubleshooting tools:
A pair of headphones (or earbuds) and a TRS to XLR adapter.
A line-level output will actually drive a pair of headphones just fine. Maybe not audiophile-grade, but certainly enough to hear if there’s signal present or not.
Quite often while testing device outputs, or tracking down where a signal gets lost in a live situation, I’ll just plug in a pair of headphones.