MM - Console Room Wiring

[frederic]

Now that the vocal booth is done, the jacks have been tested and the outlet is live, time to move onto the console room.

First step, hack off existing cabling snips off the patch bay(s):



And yes I'm saving the longer snips for making shorter TRS patch cords later. I'm cheap and like to recycle. Wait, no frugal. Naaah, cheap SOB.

OKay, that was boring, time to do something else LMAO. The power cords behind the console table are a mess, and I can't crawl back there without knocking plugs out, so I've installed two 48" 20-something outlet powerstrips on the wall, the bottom one for the computer and items that should be on with the computer (video monitors, front L/R Amp, and monitoring mixer) so I don't have to turn the entire studio on just to surf the net. The top outlet strip is for all the recording gear, and is attached to an outlet that also provides power to the producer's rack, so all the recording gear goes on together.



The first picture is the power wiring before I've done anything, as you can see it's a nasty mess. While the second picture is only what I've done so far (more to do!) you can see I installed a wire shelf on the wall that doesn't quite reach the console table, and I simply draped the wires over that. I was going to mount the power strips on the underside of the console table, but then for sure the wall warts would eventually work loose and fall out - probably right in the middle of something important. The shelf was nice and cheap too.

In the lower right corner of the picture you can see a big nasty wad of velcro wire ties I have to pull apart. And there are some other odds and ends dangling down, but this ultimately will make it easier to crawl through should I need to fix something down the road. Under the two powerstrips, will be two side-by-side 4U "racks" that are angled 30 degrees, and will house four ADC TRS patch bays to feed the producer's desk at the back on one side, and a variety of other patch bays on the the other side. Things like wordclock, lightpipe, akainet, all that kinda stuff. Just have to make the patch bays.

more later!

[deepwater]

You know you can have custom BIN cords made that branch out into 4 or more ends. That way you only have one cable that goes to 4 or more things.

[punkin]

My hat is of to you Frederic. You're like handyman squared. I'm really enjoying watching your place come together.

Thanks,
sjl

[Track Rat]

This looks very familiar to me some how.

[frederic]

Originally Posted by Track Rat

This looks very familiar to me some how.

Good ideas often are stolen

Frederic "Thief" Midimonkey.

[Track Rat]

Originally Posted by frederic

Frederic "Thief" Midimonkey.

At this level, we're not thieves, we're "professionals".

[DDev]

Originally Posted by Track Rat

At this level, we're not thieves, we're "professionals".

The sign of a true professional is his ability to plagiarize

Now Frederic, to make this a true imitation you have to weave those beautiful looms (the European term for wire harnesses) to look as nice and organized as Trackrats

Darryl.....

[frederic]

I will be doing so. I have bag after bag of wire tie. I just don't want to tie things up until I do all the cabling. THEN tie it

[frederic]

Minor Update: 2004.02.22

Today I disassembled all the test wiring for wordclock (using cable TV splitters) and permanently mounted them under the monitor shelf, screwing them into the MDF. Ran all the wires, and now everything in the front half of the room can see wordclock and syncs beautifully. That's 9 wordclock devices so far, plus I've decided to make another rack and replace my ugly metal homemade rack, and shove all the akai recorders there. Workclock for those worked fine with the cables draped across the floor, so I'm not worried about it.

Also daisychained all the little Tascam TMD1000's together feeding the TMD4000 big mixer, s/pdif out to s/pdif in, except for the last one which feeds aes/ebu to the TMD4000. That all works very well too, I'm pleased so far.

Also connected the TMD4000 console room out (analog) to the DJ mixer to the 4th position, so now my DJ mixer (which I'm using as a monitor mixer) is full as by design.

Also visited Sam Ash today, and they were having some kind of huge one day sale, so I spent more than I should. Stocked up on XLR-XLR mic cables, bought a 9-mic padded flight case, and a 5-guitar upgright stand that doesn't take up too much space. Of course when I get home, I realized I had six guitars/basses. oooops. I'll not out my G10C in the stand, since its skinny anyway. That solves that.

They also had a small pile of "dirt cheap woofers" they were trying to unload, so I snagged two 8" JBL woofers, so I can put my larger monitors back together using these. They had JBL drivers originally, and these physically look the same, so we'll see how that turns out. Beats having woofer/tweeter on the right, and tweeter on the left for sure! I use the monitors on top of them more anyway, these are just for reviewing material on different speakers.

Did some general soldering, made a few patch cords, that sorta thing. My eyes were bothering me most of the day so I didn't overdo the soldering. Time for some eyedrops.

[DDev]

Sounds like a productive day even if you didn't get those patchbays soldered up

Keep it coming!!

Darryl.....

[frederic]

Alrightly... update on the coax-splitter wordclock system.

I concede. It does not work to the degree that I need it to. It does work well for small amounts of gear (less than 10), but once you hit 11, 12, 13, 14 some of my gear "pops" off track and goes nuts.

I've tried many, many combinations of wiring this up, and each four-port splitter essentially can drive only three pieces of gear, not four, *IF* the equipment is like my smaller TMD1000 tascam mixers where the 75 ohm terminator cannot be disabled. I guess I could dismantle them and hack off the resistors off the motherboards. But I'm not liking that idea for some reason. Works great for devices where you can eliminate the termination resistor by flipping a switch, one can daisychain splitters no problem, I tried that on purpose to see what happens. Triton, TMD4000, Akai Digital Dubber, Four DR16's, two DR8's, and a couple of A/D converters wired kludgily (new word) with daisy chained splitters - works well.

So I took everything apart and pulled out the scope again (the good one). Wordclock out from the Lucid is definately a TTL signal - 0-5V - and a darn nice square wave. TTL. Since the coax splitters are metal, thus forcing all the wordclock outs to share a ground and I experienced no hum it's obvious to me this is acceptable practice with wordclock. So, I'm going to combine the two concepts and make a huge-ass wordclock buffer/amp that is expandable, and shove onto a 1U panel.

Like so...

I breadboarded the circuit last night, and it worked fine. What came in, went out, looked just about identical (though off phase) as the signal from the Lucid wordclock generator. So if all my gear runs off a copy of the circuit on the right half of the schematic, they will all be in phase.

Gonna buy some chips today and solder this up. I'm tired of messing with this. wasted five hours last night.