Hardware & signal path
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.
In practice
Use it when the room is too loud to hear drift in a blend, and switch back when it is not.
Put the cue in the ear you keep on the headphones and the master in the ear that is off the cup, so the monitor and the headphone agree rather than compete. Because the mode is mono, the low end sums — which is fine for judging timing and misleading for judging how wide a record sounds, so make width decisions on the master rather than in the cue. If you find yourself leaving it on all night, check the booth monitor level first: split cue is a workaround for a room, and a room that needs it permanently is usually a room where the monitor is set wrong.
Mono
What you give up
One ear each
How it separates them
Loud rooms
When it earns its place
Where these come from: Monitoring practice on standard mixer layouts, not catalog figures. For what we can measure, see what summing to mono does.
Why it matters
In a loud booth it is often the difference between hearing the drift and guessing at it. Two signals blended into both ears fight each other; two signals in separate ears stay distinguishable however loud the room is.
The cost is real and worth knowing before you switch it on. Everything is mono, so you cannot judge the stereo width of the incoming record — and one ear carrying a signal the other does not is more fatiguing over a long set.
Frequently asked
What does split cue do?+
It sends the cued channel to one ear and the master to the other, in mono, so the two signals stay separable instead of blending into each other in both ears.
Is split cue better than cue mix?+
In a loud booth, usually. In a quiet one, a blended cue is easier on the ears and keeps stereo, which cue mix does and split cue cannot.
Why is split cue mono?+
Because it uses the two stereo channels to carry two different sources. There is no stereo left to reproduce once one side is the cue and the other is the master.
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.
Cue mix
The cue mix knob sets the balance in your headphones between the cued channel and the master output. Fully one way you hear only the track you are lining up; fully the other, only what the room is hearing.
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.
Mono sum and phase
Summing to mono adds the left and right channels together. Anything out of phase between them cancels rather than adding, which is why a wide stereo bass can lose most of its weight on a mono system.
Explore: Pre-fade listen · Mixing guides · Score a transition · All DJ terms