Headphone amp question

[CSmith]

Short version: Mixing 4 headphone outputs into 1 with a passive mixer, but volume levels are very low (insertion loss of 12 dB from mixer). I want to know if a headphone amp between the mixer and headphones will ramp up the volume to an acceptable level without causing degradation in sound quality.

More info:

Right now I'm trying to come up with a way to be able to hear what I'm recording into my mixer and hear the backing tracks/metronome from the computer at the same time.

I use a Yamaha Audiogram USB mixer to record piano, electronic drums, and guitar. It works fine for recording. I can use either the headphone jacks on the instruments themselves or the headphone jack on the mixer to hear what I'm playing, but with the headphones on I can't hear what's coming from the computer when I want to play along to a metronome or other parts I've previously recorded.

Listening to just the computer speakers is okay, but I can't hear exactly what I'm playing while I'm playing it unless I set things up so the sound from the mixer gets mixed into the computer's output, but because of the driver's latency, I have about 25 ms of lag between what I play and when I hear it.

I decided to get a small, passive mixer (ART SplitMix4) to combine the headphone output from all instruments and the computer and then plug my headphones into the output from there, but the problem is (as those of you who know a decent bit about hardware already understand), that the volume is too low. With the output on my computer and this mixer at max, it's audible but not quite enough. That's almost a solution, but unfortunately on the drums, guitar preamp, and piano, the volume for the headphone jacks is the same as for the 1/4 outputs, so if I ramp up the volume to hear them in the headphones, the levels going in for recording are going to be insanely high.

So, will a headphone amp connected to the output of the mixer and then running headphones through that solve my problem? Or is there a better solution?

[Moseph]

I'd start by seeing if you can fix the latency so you can monitor from the computer rather than patching together a signal routing solution. Are you using ASIO drivers?

[CSmith]

Yes, using ASIO drivers. I have several installed. I'm doing this in FL Studio, by the way. The ASIO DirectX Full Duplex driver gives me 93ms at 44100Hz. If I set the sample rate to 96000Hz, I get 43ms with this driver. It won't let me set the sample rate any higher than that.

Using ASIO4ALL v2, I'm able to set the sample rate no higher than 44100, giving me 7ms, but I can still hear enough delay that it bothers me. I think it's reporting a lower latency than I'm actually getting.

cmasiopPCIX can get me down to 6ms.

The Generic Low Latency ASIO Driver isn't as good as these others, and I can't actually make it so I can hear my input. The other driver I have is the Yamaha USB ASIO driver, and while it gets down to 20ms, the only output I can select is the output on the mixer itself.

I might have been testing things the wrong way before, because I was sure I wasn't able to actually go that low. I'll check some more stuff out and see if I can't eke out another millisecond or two.

In regard to my original question, would a headphone amp be able to raise the signal loud enough to be useable and not significantly degraded in quality?

Thank you for getting me to go back and check my drivers again.