Console Tables

  • Thread starter Thread starter frederic
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lost studios said:
Sweet concepts Frederic! BTW... how are you running them TMD's within your setup?

Essentially, the left most mixer would be "1", and the right most mixer would be "12". S/pdif out of 1 goes to s/pdif in on 2, and this continues through all the mixers. I have s/pdif out on each mixer configured as buss L/R, and s/pdif on each mixer configured as "Aux Return" since I don't need pan or EQ on this particular input as the mixer prior does all this for the signals it actually mixes, and passes through this aux.

the TMD1000's have eight analog ins, which connect to my rack-mount midi synth farm, and the TDIF connections connect to Motu 2408's which I use as "stupid" format converters, giving me lightpipe on the other side for the Akai DR16 recorders. The reason for this weird conversion is due to the Akai recorders having a 16-ch lightpipe card available, but only a 8-ch TDIF card available. 16-ch recorders need 16-ch interfaces, period or eight tracks can't be utilized.

The TMD1000's have a full midi implementation, so my cakewalk flips them from "record mode" to "mix mode" on the fly, and all of the mixers flip together. What I do is set up all the basics in the two configurations, mix and record mode, then dump it into cakewalk as sysex - then feed that to all the other mixers.

Once this is done, I can use the TMD1000 closest to my sitting position as a mixer, but also as a controller, since the TMD-1000's transmit vol and pan information "live" as well. So I don't have to get up, move out of my mixing position, to adjust the settings of a mixer "way over there" on the table, I simply have to flip a little midi routing software that came with my Emagic Unitor interfaces and temporarily route the close mixer's midi out to the far mixer's midi in. If I like the settings, I tell Cakewalk to save it as part of the midi mix :)

Each mixer utilizes channels 1-16 on a midi port, so I lose 12 midi ports off my emagic interfaces, which have 7 ports per unit on the back, and 1 port on the front (port being two jacks, in and out), and I have four Unitors and four AMT8's. The AMT8's are the same thing, minus the smtpe syncing capability. Since the first four Unitors have this, all the midi interfaces sync together with everything else. Works well actually.

Since I record everything dry, generally, in "record mode" busses 1-4 on the TMD1000's is routed through TDIF to the recorders on buss 1-8. To fill up all 16 tracks, I'd have to do four passes. Sometimes this is necessary, sometimes not, depending what particular synths, drum machines, high hats etc need to be isolated for specific, later processing. I tend to treat snares, kick, and high hats uniquely for a specific sound, and the rest of the kit(s) merge together in stereo.

In mix mode, buss 1-4 is sent instead to TDIF, to the analog out jacks on the top of the mixers, which in turn will pass through patch bays to my 22U stack of analog outboard. While the TMD1000's have internal effects I'll be darned if I can get them all to work the way I want. Some work fine, some don't, so I use outboards to pick up the slack. I have several outboard gear I like, keep, and nearly have a fetish for. :)

the TMD-4000 is a little different, since its a true 32x8 console. It has out of the box eight analog ins, and I installed another analog card giving me analog 9-16, as well as two lightpipe cards giving me 16ch of lightpipe. The vocal booth, most commonly used midi modules, etc will be attached to this mixer as will my "master" DR16, so if I don't need to use a huge plethora of midi gear, the primary stuff will all connect to the TMD4000. This gives me the most flexibility as well as keeps me sitting in the center of the console table in the optimum listening position. It also supports 5.1 surround, so if I decide to get back into that arena, I can use this mixer as well. The TMD4000 also offers a lot more flexibility in monitoring mixes with clever uses of the busses, something the TMD1000's clearly lack.

The first TMD-1000 also has a digital I/O card giving me an additional TDIF connection as well as a second s/pdif in. The TDIF is converted from lightpipe, which six channels of lightpipe are used to connect in a Korg Triton Rack. The S/Pdif connection "in" connects to my fender cybertwin digital "I can be anything" guitar amp. This makes for a cleaner connection on the amp, and the Triton lightpipe allows me to split up different, simultaniously played patchs for more flexibility. This digital i/o card essentially disables the analog 1-8 on that mixer, but its easily flipped back via settings for other gear if for "some reason" I don't have enough inputs :)

Since i'm primarily mixing midi equipment, I don't really need 8 busses for every recording. When I do, I use the TMD4000, but most of the time the TMD1000's work just dandy. My specific need is many, many inputs, which this cheap kludge of gear gives me.

For vocals, acoustical guitar, fugal horns and the like, I use an AKG or Marshall mike depending on my mood, through a homemade 3-12AX7 preamp that in turn connects to the TMD4000, which is my master mixer I guess. Even though I really like my preamp, its not rackmountable and essentially is a plywood box with three tubes sticking out. I either need to replace it with something else (Joe Meek?) or repackage it into a rackmount configuration so it doesn't get kicked around and messed up.

I found early on that varying volume and pan through midi, on the gear itself, significantly lowers my headroom and increases "grunge", whereas setting them for 95% volume and center, and using the mixers to control vol/pan results in a much cleaner sound, especially on older modules that have only 64 steps in their volume control rather than 128, like the mixers and newer gear.

Wordclock was complex, I wasted a lot of time trying to pass wordclock in and out across the plethora of digital gear, and it just wasn't cooperating, so I shelled out for an Aardsync (should have gotten the Lucid, oh well), and that connects to a 16-ch active NTSC/audio splitter that kindly passes the wordclock to any and all devices. This way, everything sees the same wordclock signal at the same time. Solved a lot of drifting problems.

There is a "huge" delay between what goes in mixer 1 and what comes out of mixer 12, as each mixer adds a little processing time. The way around this on mix is to systematically nudge tracks based on simple math. (64-track#)*nudge amount.

Works fine :) Nudging is annoying, but less annoying than not having enough faders and pans. Just my preference. Nudging is easy based on the Akai remote I "finally" acquired.

The next thing I need to acquire is an Akai RC15 remote, which gives me the tape transport controls on a 30' cord, which plugs into the Akai DL1500 "big" remote for the Akai recorder farm. The Dl1500 is a lot like an Alesis BRC and the RC15 is a lot like the Alesis "LRC" if you are verse in adat-speak.

The last little tidbit that might be important is the final stereo mix goes back into the PC, via s/pdif through a soundblaster live card, with digital I/O. There is a quirk of this card where it will automatically do a frequency conversion to 48K if your digital gear is configured for 44.1K or less, and to be honest this automatic format conversion is terrible - you can actually hear it with ordinary headphones. So, my wordclock provides 48K through and through, so there is no conversion in hardware. I had tried a behringer format converter which my local music store was blowing out for a mere $29, and that was just as bad, so I do everything at 48K, then when ready to burn a CD, I use software to convert things and I've been happier with the results. Free things like Audacity, CDex, etc. This too works pretty good. Also recording at 48K allows my fostex DAT to be the master stereo recorder if i want, though I don't do that very often, usually digital stereo to the PC.

How's that for a convoluted mess? :D
 
Man, that setup with your mixers is a total mindblower too.

This was because at the time I started in this digital mixing stuff, I should have bought an 02R. I didn't because they were vewwy expensive and I hadn't figured out the cascading of those units.

Thats why i went with the TMD4000's (I had four at one point). Price and cascading ability.

Of course the 02Rs can be cascaded, but Yamaha never responded to my emails, and my local dealer kept saying "no way". So. misinformation steered me in this direction. And then as my frustration with the 4000's automation software and that whole fiasco as I've outlined previously, I just bailed and went with e-bay specials on the TMD1000's.

I *still* should have dumped the cash and purchased a pair of 02R's and just wired up a lot of patch bays and called it a day.
 
WOW!! That is a massively complex setup. How many evolutionary steps did it take for you to get to the point where you :

a) Understood what you needed to get what you wanted;
b) figured out all the loopholes that were required to go through to get everything to play together.

Amazing.....

Darryl.....
 
WOW!! That is a massively complex setup. How many evolutionary steps did it take for you to get to the point where you :

1,715 steps :) j/k

a) Understood what you needed to get what you wanted;

This was easy, actually. I was using a bunch of analog sampson MPL2242 mixers, which have 10 mono channels and 6 stereo channels, sitting on a piece of plywood I had lying across an old office desk. This gave me enough channels to support some of my midi gear and all 48 channels of my Otari 2" machines. But, because the mixers were really "live" mixers, they didn't have tape channels, so I had to repatch things constantly. Before that I had a Fostex450-16 analog console with a Tascam 8-track cassette recorder... I think 238 Syncasette? It was rackmount, I don't recall the number, but the Fostex (which I still have) has tape-flip switches, which is nice.

Anyway, i was at a crossroads because I was plagued with several problems. While I liked cascading several mixers, because if I needed more channels, I just bought another mixer and made my console larger. Other than the Mackie 8 buss, no one else made such a thing "officially". I had the Mackie 32x8 and several 24E's when my Otari's were in my pro studio I no longer have, and I wasn't very pleased with the Mackie overall. It did sound good, but I had some power supply reliability issues and I felt the EQ was a little hokey. The power supply issues is what really turned me off. Downtime sucks when you have clients standing next to you wondering 1) what the smoke is from and 2) why you aren't recording them.

Anyway, enter the TMD4000. For the reasons in my earlier post I went with this mixer, with the intentions of expanding it to two. When I did, thats about when e-bay came online more or less (or I found it, whichever), and I started going on massive midi-module shopping sprees. Why not get four to five modules for the price of one new one at Sam Ash? So over a year I started spending my monthly "studio fund" and now I have more modules than I need.

So, I got another TMD4000, then a fourth, which all worked as one unit, I was happy with it, and I put the Otari's in storage and started using blackface adats, another left over from my old pro studio. Thats how I ended up with lightpipe cards in the 4000's :)

Anyway, as the blackface adats started getting cranky, and while I could easily fix them with replacement idler wheels, heads and such, I was getting really sick of doing this on what seemed to be a weekly basis. So, I started investigating digital recorders. This was, on, latter part of 98, early part of 99 I think, anyway, my choices at the time were the very expensive Paris, EMU had a box that was impossible to navigate and didn't support a remote (having had so many blackface adats I grew very used to having a BRC around), Fostex had an 8-ch unit, Yamaha had one that was expensive, etc. Anyway, while wandering around my local music store in CT at the time, they had a used Akai DR8 for sale for a whopping $600 bucks, with a midi interface, smpte interface, and an 8-ch lightpipe card. So I bought that and a used JL Cooper cuepoint at the same time, on a total whim, not knowing if the JL Cooper would properly support the akai unit. I got lucky.

Then one akai DR8 became two, thanks to ebay, and I was going to acquire a third and fourth unit, but started to realize I ran out of rack space. In that bedroom studio, I had four 7' racks loaded to the gills, to the point where I bolted them together, bolted them to a plywood base, then put eight cinderblocks on the plywood to keep the racks from wobbling :)

Where would I put two more DR8's? On the floor? No. So, out of pure coincidence I picked up on ebay my first DR16 to replace to two DR8's, and a second DR16 to give me the extra 16 channels I wanted. I got all this to work together just fine, it was fairly easy, even though I didn't have a master wordclock. Where I was struggling was with the TMD4000's automation software so i had to revisit this. I offered, if Tascam gave me the protocol they use between the mixers and the PC software, I'd write software (actually my on-staff programmer at the time would, I was self-employed), so that I didn't need one PC per mixer, and instead, run all four mixers off one four-port RS422 card using one software package, on one PC. That never panned out for a variety of reasons, and with replacement TMD4000 parts getting scarce, rare, impossible to find, I made the tough decision to dump them. But, what to replace it with? Again, I looked at the 02R's but at 6-7K a pop with the proper interface cards, it was a tough nut to swallow, chewing aside.

I then observed my recording/mixing style, and really thought about what I do. While at the time i had done quite a bit of 5.1 surround mixing, I didn't really enjoy it because there was no writing/composing artsy fartsy stuff on my part. All I did was clean up pre-existing analog mixes and encode them for two particular customers.

What *I* wanted to do was write, record, using Midi technology, after all, I had four 7' racks of the gear at the time, why not use it more? Its fantastic having that many sounds, patches, voices all at my fingertips.

So, in thinking about what I really need, and not being able to afford the 02R mixers at the time, I decided to try once again the cascade mixer method of making a large console. I knew a few people that were using three TMD1000's with a Motu 2408, a 24-ch digital interface and recording audio on their PC. So guess what I bought :) I didn't like the Motu as a recording device, getting it to work with windows ME (at the time) was a pain in the ass, so I simply used it as a format converter to one and a half DR16 recorders.

Thats when it hit me - TMD1000 to motu 2408 format converter, to Akai DR16's. While this is not the best system in the world, its suprisingly simple to use. Over a two year period I added more mixers (off ebay, typically in the 300-350 range), and more DR16 recorders (off ebay, typically in the 600-800 range), and one auction was for a box of 10 akai DR16 ethernet cards, which is Akai's method of genlocking their recorders together to a remote unit, the DL1500 which I acquired only a few months ago. July, I think.

Anyway, thats how it exploded from a few devices to fader/pan heaven. The advantage of piecemeal is that I can add as I need, and sell off what I don't need any longer. Of course this is by no means a good substitute for three 02Rs, but then again, I have all this stuff why dump it and start over yet again, when what I have truly does work for me because of my extensive midi synth work.

This method (especially buying stuff on ebay) allows me to buy the "real thing" rather than a "Sampled" version... I still have my fender chroma polaris if you remember those. I've downloaded samples of that synth many times but they never sound as nice as the real, lush analog thing. Of course its big, heavy, doesn't fit in a rack, but thats an exception. Most of my gear goes in racks.

b) figured out all the loopholes that were required to go through to get everything to play together.

The only real loophole was wordclock. That plagued me randomly for a few years until I finally got it through my thick skull that daisychaining audio is fine, daisychaining wordclock is not. And to that end, using a Korg Triton as a master wordclock generator was just stupid. THough sadly, it was the most accurate, stable wordclock generator I had at the time. The akais drift badly as do the tascam TMD1000's. The one 4000 I have is very stable, but it puts out a 47,999.2 hz wordclock. Thats not 48K. So, I finally went after master wordclock units, and I was going to buy the Lucid for a variety of reasons, but I had to mail order it, wait a week, I had a project already overdue, and the local music monkeys had the ardsync in stock, so that ended up in my rack and that was that.

I should learn to be more patient.

Figuring out all the capability that wasn't obvious, like controlling far, out of reach mixers with close, near my sitting position mixers, took some time. Its not a specific feature in any of the manuals, I actually figured it out accidentally. I had cakewalk routing the output of one mixer to another, and the second mixer kept changing the pan and volume on me which drove me up the wall, until I figured out I had essentially made a midi loop. Then I realized I could take advantage of this, and here I am, with a midi jack on my arse :)

I just highlighted the big steps, didn't want to bore everyone. It was a fun three years to get from a row of samson analog "live" mixers to what I have now.

Still should have gotten the 2 or 3 o2rs, but thats another story :) Of course if I would be willing to part with soem of my midi modules/gear, I wouldn't need so many channels, now would I :)
 
Damn these big snowflakes!

Rick... you didn't have a chance to snap any pictures yet, have you? Not trying to be a pest or anything, just REALLY interested in what you are doing...

I am considering reducing the amount of steel in my console table, and using wood, though I have to figure out how to get some strength out of it, without making the table too thick.

only 171 more sketches to go!!!! LOL
 
G'day to you frederic. Well, I just finished my second cup of coffee, and was just getting this old tired body up to face the assembly. Man, after being off work for a year, going back and immedietly doing strenuous physical stuff for 2 days left me sore and grouchy.:D Ha!

Yep, got all the modifications done to the platforms, and new panels cut and ready to fasten to the top, so I should at least have the legs and frame in place today. I WILL post some pics in the next few hours. I'ts 9:15 here, so figure about noon here. Check in sometime this afternoon. I'm really looking forward to it as my console has been torn down for 6 months now. The room is a disaster, with all the boxes and stuff. Pay no attention.

BTW, I've been working on my plan, and along the way I've been investigating real serious soundproofing construction methodology of medical RF rooms. WOW! Talk about technical construction. Makes a studio look like childs play:p Heres a couple of .gifs to show ya. But it tells me some things. Especially the doors and seals. Learning alot about that lately. Seals around doors are the MAIN leaks for soundproofing. They can totally negate your STC rating in walls. Anyway, enough of my bla. Time to get busy, so hang in there, the pics are coming today.!!


OOPS. The file is too big. I'll have to convert it later. Sorry. Doesn't matter anyway as this stuff is WAY too complex for the needs of a studio. That is unless you have a 747 taking off over your house!;)

Hell with it, heres the link.

http://www.imedco.ch/_images/products/noise_suppression/titel_73_big.jpg
 
HELP!!!

I just remembered something. Frederic, I've got to run an electric supply up one of the legs to the console. Damn, it's going to be parallel to a couple of snakes within the legs, which are 3x6 rectangular steel tubing. See the pic? Ok, I'm wondering, IF I ran the electrical wires inside of flex conduit that is grounded, up through the legs with the snakes, if that will help shield the electric field from the audio snakes? Any help is appreciated. Thanks frederic!
 
Re: HELP!!!

RICK FITZPATRICK said:
I just remembered something. Frederic, I've got to run an electric supply up one of the legs to the console. Damn, it's going to be parallel to a couple of snakes within the legs, which are 3x6 rectangular steel tubing. See the pic? Ok, I'm wondering, IF I ran the electrical wires inside of flex conduit that is grounded, up through the legs with the snakes, if that will help shield the electric field from the audio snakes? Any help is appreciated. Thanks frederic!

It will help a little bit.

You can also use your legs as the shielding. Say, instead of using one 1/4" thick 4x8 rectangular tubing, you could use 1/4" 4x6 and a 2x4 rectangular tubing, put the electrical in the smaller one, and the audio in the larger one. That would work also.

But yes, you can use conduit and ground it. I would recommend solid conduit over flexi... it shields better under most circumstances.
 
G'day to you frederic. Well, I just finished my second cup of coffee, and was just getting this old tired body up to face the assembly.

And to you my friend :)

the next few hours. I'ts 9:15 here, so figure about noon here. Check in sometime this afternoon. I'm really looking forward to it as my console has been torn down for 6 months now. The room is a disaster, with all the boxes and stuff. Pay no attention.

I will be watching the forum on and off most of the day... with all the snow its going to be a slow day. I had intended to use today as my "honeydo" day, but since its snowing, and I need materials from home cesspool for studio work, it will be a "donada" day. Maybe I'll draw my console some more and figure out the flip on a flip vocal booth floor section :)

BTW, I've been working on my plan, and along the way I've been investigating real serious soundproofing construction methodology of medical RF rooms. WOW! Talk about technical construction. Makes a studio look like childs play:p Heres a

I guess they are really worried about the next patient hearing the current patient's screaming :D That is one impressive design to say the least.

BTW, links are fine, you certainly don't have to kill yourself converting, scaling, and uploading stuff.

And you're absolutely right about gaps in doors and windows... they do lose an awful lot of your STC rating of everything else. Probably why Steve and John in the past harped on a few of us into taking it very seriously. Harping that was VERY much appreciated BTW.

Some of us are denser than the materials we use. I wonder what *my* STC rating is. probably 175 :D
 
Ok frederic, thanks. I just figured out that I think I'll run solid conduit up the exterior front of the leg and the cables up the interior. No body will see this or probably the room for that matter as this hobby is pretty much for me alone at the moment. So, I'll compromise for effeciency today because I WANT THIS DONE!!:D
 
RICK FITZPATRICK said:
Ok frederic, thanks. I just figured out that I think I'll run solid conduit up the exterior front of the leg and the cables up the interior. No body will see this or probably the room for that matter as this hobby is pretty much for me alone at the moment. So, I'll compromise for effeciency today because I WANT THIS DONE!!:D

That works :)

Another option is to stick a "flat" down the leg, then drill little holes along the side of of the rectangular tubing where its supposed to be, line it up, then butt weld it in.
 
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