Any negative thoughts on this little setup...

[tubedude]

As some of you will remember, I was considering buying or building one of those desks with the rack spaces under the video monitor, and the extended shelf on both sides of the monitor for your ADAMS monitors. Ok, damnit for my MSP10s.
Anyway, I got to thinking, and maybe tis would be a better setup.

Picture in your corroded mind the following. A flat desk with no monitor riser and maybe the recessed deal where the video monitor sits kind of down into the desk and angled up towards you.
Put the speakers on stands and have them about 2 feet from the wall behind the desk.
Have the shape of the desk top cut away at about a 45 degree angle on each side of you (where its about 3 feet wide in the front, around 5 feet or so in the back) and have two of those low slanted roller racks for all the gear, on on your left, one on your right, with it kinds of set against the 45 degree angle, facing up and towards your sitting position.
My idea is to get the monitors back away from me a little bit, and away from the rear walls some, and not have the monitor or a rack get in the way of sound.
I see a lot of mastering studio pictures set up similar to this.
Whatcha think?
Thanks for any and all replies, help and ideas.

 

[knightfly]

Works for me - I tried using a 21" monitor set high between nearfields for a while, couldn't stand the pain. Lower is much better. I'm slowly getting a design together for a 3 flat panel display setup, tilted back enough to get nearfields at the right ear height and still see all three monitors over my two mixers - knee height has to be kept to a minimum, but if you build from scratch it's just barely doable (and well worth it IMO) My setup will utilize two slant front, tilt-out from the bottom racks, one on each side of the knee hole, and modular for portability. Desktop and bridge one piece, spanning the two "sidecars", most likely.

The tilt-outs will let me lay the rack frames (1" square steel tubing) flat on the floor and access all rear connections, wiring stuff to two common hinge points (one on each side, to separate the power) - this way, all connections will be accessible from the front of the desk and the faces will tilt enough to see (around 15 degrees)

When I finally get my new facility going, this will get "demoted" to an editing suite if it works as well as I hope... Steve

 

[tubedude]

Cool... post some drawings as soon as you get them together, and then some pics...

 

[frederic]

I tried using a 21" monitor set high between nearfields for a while, couldn't stand the pain. Lower is much better.

See, I will be doing the opposite. I've experimented a lot with monitor height, chair height, and keyboard height, and nothing floats my boat more than leaning back in a high-back chair (that goes slightly above my head), keyboard on lap, and monitors are slightly higher than eye level, angled down.

Why? I lean back like a slouch

I'm slowly getting a design together for a 3 flat panel display setup, tilted back enough to get nearfields at the right ear height and still see all three monitors over my two mixers - knee height has to be kept to a minimum, but if you build from

If you have no gaming interests whatsoever (meaning directx and glide and 3dfx drivers and such) Matrox has a 4-port VGA card that will do the trick, G-450 or G-550 (I think).

If you like gaming and can suffer with two monitors, I can pull the cover off my HP for ya and tell ya which card is in there. It was aabout $150, had 64mb of ram, and its super fast for gaming (half life gives about 60 frames per second). Raetheon or something like that, based on the nvidia chipsets of course.

Nothing is better than Nvidia in my opinion.

 

[tubedude]

This idea was mainly to get a little room for the monitors to breath, mostly. I'm hoping its better than having them on the desk next to the video monitor. Is it?

Whats the ideal monitor distance:
From the rear walls? is 2 feet decent?
From your ears?
From each other?

 

[knightfly]

Frederic, looking at the Matrox Parhelia, 3 outs - early drivers were buggy for audio, but now seem OK. Not too impressed with the Nvidia card in my Sony desktop, seems pretty heat sensitive. Also, I think the 450 and 550 Matrox cards only support two discrete outs - the only 4-8 out cards of theirs I've seen are PCI, not cool for an audio machine -

Paul, even drawings may be awhile, there are too many projects ahead of this one - you want an equilateral triangle (duh) with its third point just behind your head, and the spread between speakers enough to keep that triangle when your head is where it needs to be relative to desk, etc - as to wall spacing, it can make a big difference in speaker response - you might check out this -

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=630

play with absorption values and positioning, etc, and note the differences in response curves ... Steve

 

[frederic]

Frederic, looking at the Matrox Parhelia, 3 outs - early drivers were buggy for audio, but now seem OK. Not too

Okay, will do!

impressed with the Nvidia card in my Sony desktop, seems pretty heat sensitive. Also, I think the 450 and 550 Matrox cards only support two discrete outs - the only 4-8 out cards of theirs I've seen are PCI, not cool for an audio machine -

I've never had a heat problem with the nvidia card, or anything else for that matter. But I also use rackmount PC's that have more fans than screws

This is the card I have in the quad-head studio computer....

http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/g450_mms/home.cfm

Drives four monitors just fine. Its a 2d only card, it stinks for gaming. But for cakewalk and adobe premiere, its perfect.

Nothing wrong with a 6400x1280 desktop



Paul, even drawings may be awhile, there are too many projects ahead of this one - you want an equilateral triangle (duh) with its third point just behind your head, and the spread between speakers enough to keep that triangle when your head is where it needs to be relative to desk, etc - as to wall spacing, it can make a big difference in speaker response - you might check out this -

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=630

play with absorption values and positioning, etc, and note the differences in response curves ... Steve [/B]