Hardware & signal path
Booth monitor
The booth monitor is the speaker pointed at the DJ, fed from its own output with its own level control. It is separate from the master, so turning it up changes what you hear and nothing the room hears.
In practice
Set the booth once, early, and reach for the booth knob rather than the master for the rest of the night.
The two controls look interchangeable and are not: master is the room’s level and belongs to the engineer, booth is yours. Reaching for the wrong one is the fastest way to make an enemy in a venue, and on a system with a limiter it may do nothing audible in the room while destroying your own reference. Keep the booth quieter than feels natural — you will hear detail better and last longer — and if a microphone is in use, expect the monitor to be the thing feeding back, so pull it down before anyone starts talking.
Booth, not master
Which knob is yours
Set at soundcheck
When to decide it
Down for a mic
Where feedback starts
Where these come from: Booth practice on standard club mixer layouts, not catalog figures — nothing in our data describes a room. For what we can measure, see why the master is not yours to move.
Why it matters
It is the only reference you have that is not the room, and the room is usually lying to you. Standing behind the speakers, in a corner, with bass building against a back wall, gives you a version of the mix nobody in the crowd is hearing.
Its level also quietly sets your judgement of everything else. A booth turned up until it is comfortable against a loud room makes every record sound bigger than it is, and the mixing that follows is calibrated against that.
Frequently asked
What is the difference between booth and master?+
Master is the level going to the room; booth is the level going to the speaker facing you. They are separate outputs, and only one of them is the DJ’s to adjust.
How loud should a booth monitor be?+
Quiet enough to hear detail and loud enough to beat the room. Turning it up until it feels comfortable against a loud crowd usually means every record after it sounds bigger than it is.
Why does the booth monitor feed back?+
Because it is aimed at where a microphone would be. If a mic is in use, bring the monitor down first — the feedback loop almost always runs through it rather than through the main system.
Related terms
Pre-fade listen
Pre-fade listen sends a channel to your headphones before its fader is up, so you hear the next track while the room hears only what is already playing. It is what the cue button on every mixer does.
Split cue
Split cue makes the headphones mono and sends the cued channel to one ear and the master to the other. You lose the stereo image and gain clean separation between the track you are cueing and the one playing.
Headroom
Headroom is the gap between where your signal is sitting and the point where it distorts. It is the room left for the loud parts, and for whatever you do to the channel next.
Gain
Gain sets how hot a track arrives at the channel before anything else touches it. It is a correction for how the record was mastered, not a volume control for the room.
Explore: Headroom · Mixing guides · Score a transition · All DJ terms