I'm not a big fan of "output modules" - in a lot of cases they are unnecessary... I've never used one in 7 years... but I've always had mixers with headphone outputs - a rebel technologies mix03 and a tesseract modular tex-mix... if I needed (& only if I needed balanced or isolated outputs - perhaps for playing gigs) would I spend money on an output module... so the question is what are you outputting to? I use a small old-ish (15years or so) yamaha mg10 mixer which can easily handle modular levels - just get your gain staging right (ie low) - and most mixers and audio interfaces will work perfectly...
and as for vc crossfaders and auto-panners - maybe get more vcas and patch them yourself - it's modular after all - and whilst pan-law is great - a lot of records were made without it...
-- JimHowell1970
You're right, in the end I am not really looking for a full blown output module with balanced outs etc. but just a mixer with a headphone (for standalone rack use) and a "normal" stereo out if I go into my "real" mixer. If I run into the need for balanced outs due to ground problems I can always use a DI box in between.
Although I know how to pan/x-fade using VCAs/Inverters I find it quite convenient to have a bit of voltage control built into the mixer - it's modular after all :-)
So I decided to go for a Happy Nerding PanMix (and was lucky to find a shop in Europe with one in stock ...)