On EVO 4, connecting a set of headphones to the headphone port will automatically mute your monitors, making switching between loudspeaker monitoring and headphone monitoring quick and seamless.
When working on your mixes, it’s a good idea to listen to your tracks on multiple speakers and headphones to be sure that, regardless of what device your listeners are using, your mix still sounds great! So we’d typically recommend connecting up a pair of headphones and seeing what your mix sounds like as part of your mixing workflow.
When you’re listening to your headphones, you don’t want your speakers to also be playing in the background as this can interfere with your headphone monitoring, especially with open back or semi-open back headphones. Smart-Mute on EVO 4 allows you to switch between the two without having to worry about this.
You may want to have both speakers and headphones turned on at the same time if you’re feeding a monitoring mix to an artist while you listen back to the recording on a set of monitors. However, for this, you would also want the headphone and speaker outputs to be independent, so you can have separate mixes and separate volumes. This is a feature found on EVO 8 which would be better suited to this kind of workflow, with EVO 4 being better suited to solo producers, streamers and other creatives.