the use case I had in mind was to lead out of my guitar pedal board's DI pedal and into headphones for late night practicing, and while it did actually work, the sound i was getting was incredibly raw. But it was a pedal board specific issue as far as I can tell since using RP500 pedals XLR out into headphones using this vs. just the actual headphone out both sounded ok, so the cable did what it was supposed but it didn't particularly fit my needs as well as I hoped.