Headphones come in a variety of different shapes, sizes and types. Often, a user will bring home a instrument, plug in their favorite set of headphones and realize "Hey, it's really quiet!" or "It's really muddy in my headphones!" or any number of anomalies involving their headphones. Often these are not problems with your hardware, simply an incompatibility of the setup you're using in one way or another.
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For no sound out of the headphones or sound out of one side
You will want to check if you are plugging into the actual headphones or "Phones" port. Many of our devices have Main outputs and Auxillary inputs that are confused with your headphone output, and will result in no or limited sound. This is the result of the port not being setup to broadcast stereo audio to your headphones. In the Main outputs case, these are usually setup to broadcast a mono signal from each port for recording purposes, mainly to allow the user to split instruments like drums a certain way for mixing. Meanwhile your Aux port is for playing music into your instrument for jamming along to different tracks.
For quiet or muddy sound
This is often caused by an incompatible set of headphones. Headphones compatible with Alesis products are monitoring headphones that use a TRS connection, which basically splits the connector into 2 zones- Left and Right Audio. Headphones incompatible with the instruments are often consumer level equipment, and use a TRRS connection. TRRS connections on these headphones split the connector into 3 channels- Audio, Microphone, and controls. Because of the way that setup works, using these headphones with your instrument leads to only one channel coming through; resulting in only half the sound output or a muddy sound if the connector tries to sum that other audio channel the wrong way.
Please note this is not an indictment of consumer level equipment- on the correct applications for their use their sound is great. Likewise monitoring headphones can be found at affordable price points to cover your use with your Alesis instrument.
Questions? Concerns? Feedback? If you are still having trouble, please use the New Support Ticket button at the top to contact our support team for further assistance.