The Behringer P16 is a low-cost, but very useful personal monitoring mixer used in many cost-conscious environments. Although it performs admirably, there are a number of features missing from this unit that would make it an otherwise killer product. Since creating the P16, Behringer (under their Midas brand) created the DP48 system, which addresses may of the shortcomings of the P16, and adds more features to boot. However, there still remains many perfectly good P16's out in daily use that would benefit from a few improvements without having to throw the whole thing out. That is essentially what this project aims to achieve.
The following shortcomings are identified in order of most important:
- No indication at the performers end of what is on each channel
- As the P16 is essentially a tethered device (i.e. it must be plugged into cables of some sort), performers must move to the device when they need to make changes to their mix, which is especially inconvenient for vocalists on wireless microphones and IEM packs.
- In a group where the same performer does not necessarily use the same P16 each performance (e.g. churches), there is no way to recall an individual configuration that may have been set on another P16 device on the same network.
- It is difficult for an engineer to hear what a performer is hearing on their P16 when diagnosing issues.