Currently I have a home studio only for my use - a PC with Reaper on Windows in control room connected via 10m (30 ft) long USB cable with Audient ID4 in recording room. I operated Reaper remotely by phone while recording myself and it worked superb.
Recently I decided to invite a vocalist, so I need a talkback in control room and want to listen to the vocal during the session. The best coming to my mind is ASIO4ALL and combining Audient interface with USB headset in CR, BUT the headset is limited to 48 kHz, so I can't capture Audient at 88.2.
Should I buy second Audient? Upgrade Audient to some sound card with remote part connected via LAN cable? I have some budget for that.
The con for going aggregate device with that USB headset would be sacrificing stability of the system. Not to mention the limitation of the USB headset for latency with the live audio.
The con for moving into the control room would be... Well, I'm not sure what that might be but I'm sure there's a reason for the current setup/rooms!
Headphones running wired off line level always works. There's no snooty audio considerations over the headphone connection like there might be for a mic and mic preamp. So I'd just wore up the headphones with however long a cable is needed. The long cable will be fine for the headphones for this. Compromising system stability or moving rooms seems very unreasonable next to just grabbing a long cable for the phones.
Take the interface into the control room and use a 10m XLR cable to the microphone.
The interface has another mic input for a talkback mic and a headphone socket.
Avoid the USB headset.
1 interface on 1 computer at a time. No problem.
I'm all about leveraging aggregate devices for audio work. That's how this is done! But this example calls for appropriate cables only. A USB headset just isn't a device that can be used for live audio monitoring. It also would have no way to reliably sync to external sample rate clock.
Take the interface into the control room and use a 10m XLR cable to the microphone.
The interface has another mic input for a talkback mic and a headphone socket.
Avoid the USB headset.
1 interface on 1 computer at a time. No problem.
Nice. What about headphones in bedroom? 10m long cable will give you HUGE losses.