It's easy enough to plug in some cheap wireless headphones or an IEM system if you really want this.
Yeah, I've been thinking about that. Hard wiring the existing DL solo headphone output to the iPad mic input is probably cheaper/easier and would allow me to run 3rd party RTA on the solo bus with just an adapter, although AFIAK there is no off-the-shelf adapter to do this so I'd have to make one. Doable, but would have to be very careful to get the wiring right the first time or else either the DL or iPad headphone amp could be damaged. Might also require a pad, depending on how easy it is to control the DL phone outputs at very low level.
edit > It turns out that there IS an off the shelf cable that will attenuate the DL's solo out from a stereo headphone jack down to a mic level signal on the iPad/iPhone 3.5mm 4 conductor TRRS input. Its a little pricey, but no assembly required. AFAIK, its the cheapest way to be able to see the DL solo bus with an iPad RTA. Just ordered one.
http://www.kvconnection.com/product-p/km-iphone-mic42-a22.htmWireless is more tricky, what I'd really need is a decent quality wireless unit that I can send to the iPads mic input instead of cans, and that would take an input wireless plus a few adapters and probably at least one pad. More useful but not as attractive because (a) a big part of the appeal of the DL was less gear to deal with, (b) I'm a bit of a cheap bastard (partly why I went with DL instead of PreSonus in the first place)
Either way, for the amount time it would take me to make this work with just my one system, I'm pretty sure that one of Mackie's firmware jockeys could add a quick and dirty solo-to-32pin feature and make it work for everyone.
A lot of tweaking is done more out of boredom than necessity anyways
On an easy night, sure. At the other extreme, 3 or 4 weeks ago I did sound for a 5 piece acoustic old time band. Decent sized room, but standing room only, small stage and boisterous loud crowd. Upright bass and fiddle, plus 3 members alternating on fiddle, mandos, guitars and banjo every other song. 3 vocals. As the place filled up and got loud, it was really tough to get the sound to project to the back of the room without someones pickup wanting to howl, so I was being way conservative. The band was tight, they and the bar were happy with the sound, but I felt like having some better info about what was in the inputs would have been a big help - both for getting a little more gain without fear of ringing and to make sure each instrument always stood out in the mix as the lineup alternated. For this situation, it would have been much less stressful with my old rig, although I'm not sure where I would have put it.
edit > in fairness, I've also done some of my easiest gigs ever when one of the bandmembers has an iPad. In both cases, they were former bandmates so I trusted them. Getting up to speed in MF enough to move monitor faders takes no time and even without image saving, the channel and output labeling is fairly foolproof. The bands were stoked about being able to mix their own monitors and keeping on top of FOH was easy.
