D-108 Hard Drive Question

[Rock God]

Does anyone know what size hard drive is included with the D-108 as standard??

I ordered a D-108 yesterday, along with a 24 channel mixing desk. I read on the Fostex distribution company website (SCV London - UK) that 13GB is included as standard, although printed on the back of the brochure of the D-108 (In very very small print I might add!) are the words "Drive not included".

In all the excitement of buying my new equipment yesterday (we've all been there right?!) I forgot to ask the size of the hard drive included. I am thinking about cancelling the order if the 13GB drive is not included.

Any help gladly appreciated!

 

[skippy]

I recall the D-108 as coming with a 6.4Gb drive as standard (here in the US anyway). Current production D-108s, and older ones that have the v1.10 or later operating software, can be used with arbitrarily large drives and will use the whole thing. Older ones (v1.09 and earlier) were limited to 8 Gb, so there was no point in shipping them with any drives larger than the 6.4Gb unit... See what your unit tells you its software version and disk size is when you power it up.

My D1624 did come stock with a 13Gb drive, so it's quite possible that your D-108 will as well. I'm currently using mine with 30Gb drives I got from Disk Drive Depot on my last Silicon Valley business trip for about $120 each. It amuses me that the drive carriers cost about half what the drives do: they are Fostex-specific, and they are $60 per pop. It's still nice to have several of them around, though. They do make it easy to change projects seamlessly, just as advertised. Now, if they'd just provide some acoustical damping and isolation for the drive: I'm going to have to build or buy a hushbox for mine, because it really is too noisy for me to tolerate in my control room...

 

[Rock God]

Thanks...

Thanks for the info...

I called the distributors of Fostex here in the UK today, and was told that the D-108 will either have a 13GB or 20Gb hard drive, so I'll be happy with either.

It's a bit worrying to hear that that HD is so loud in operation. I have my control room and studio in one large room. I could simply put the recorder as fas away as possible from the sound source, or consider partitioning the room (which I was thinking about doing anyway).

Would you say it's too loud to have in the same room as the instruments/mics??

 

[skippy]

You can gobo the front of the machine (most of the noise leaks out through the front panel around the edges of the drive carrier slot), and that will help some. I'm thinking of trying some lead sheet screwed down over the faceplate as a workaround until I get my hushbox.

The 1624 is not too loud to have in the room for recording amplified electronic instruments, but it _is_ too loud for recording acoustic instruments and vocals with good mics (if you are going to allow any room ambience at all). In particular, mine has a 3kHz squeal that shows up very plainly on acoustic tracks. The machine raises the noise floor in my room by about 6-8dB: too much for me to shrug off, especially since the noise is basically pitched in nature (not a whitish/pinkish random noise, like an airflow "whoosh"). It also really annoys me when I'm trying to monitor critically: the disk rotation squeal is overlaid with a once per-second click as the heads seek. Argh.

Moving the machine away is a definite option. If I hadn't already terminated all those damned cables on the patch bay (and finished the drywall work!), I'd be very tempted to make them 40 feet long and relocate the machine into my mechanical room with the air handling equipment. It's cheaper for me to buy a hushbox than to do that at this point in the project, though.

 

[ausrock]

Skippy, is this excessive H/d noise confined to certain types of drives or do you find it occurs no matter what brand H/d you use.

BTW......thanx for your recent advice about D160's etc. I have my D160 here now, along with a PreSonus 8 channel compressor.......just got to wait for an 8 buss Mackie to turn up at the right price. After being told by the Australian distributors that they didn't ship a H/d with the D160 I opened mine, and surprise, there was a 10gbyte
drive fitted......BONUS.

If you have any info on hushbox design please post it here.

Cya.....and Rock God....good luck and enjoy ya music.

 

[skippy]

So far, the noise has been pretty much equivalent regardless of the drive used. The 13Gb that came stock with the unit is a Quantum Fireball, and the 30Gb drives are remanufactured Quantums as well, I think. Other manufacturers may differ- I haven't tried them.

My cheapo sound level meter unfortunately only resolves down to 50dB(a) SPL, so I had to measure at 1 foot to get a reading (56dBa while idling, peaking at 60dBa while seeking, for either drive design). These numbers will sound very high because I had to meter from such close range, but it gives a little bit of an idea of the noise. It definitely dominates the noise floor in the room. Just as another data point: the Sparcstation Ultra 5 on the desk in front of me here in my office doesn't even crack 50dBa with the meter *in physical contact* with the front panel, so the 1624 is significantly louder than that- and very pitched in nature, not white or pink like normal fan/airflow noise.

I'm not sure that many of the distributors really understand these units. They're kind of odd eggs: they aren't standalone MDMs with all the bells and whistles, so they lack sex appeal. Most distributors spend most of their time learning the more spiffy boxes, seems like. The Fostex is just a tapeless tape machine, so why should they care if it comes with a free virtual reel of tape (;-)?

I think I may take mine apart over the weekend, and look at redesigning the drive mount so that the drive can be recessed inside the unit a tad bit. This would allow me to install a gasketed door over the drive mount aperture, and that might buy me a very useful 4-6dB (especially in the 500Hz-3kHz range). I'll also look at laminating some Sonamat or something similar to the top, bottom, and front panels of the case, to add mass/damping and reduce transmission through those surfaces. It seems that it should be possible to do some significant silencing within the confines of the cabinet, since there don't seem to be any airflow provisions to speak of.

However, I've pretty much resigned myself to buying a hushbox to house the D1624 and the rackmount DAW machine I'm building to cohabitate with it. Right now the leader is the Middle Atlantic unit. I could sort-of save some money trying to build it, but frankly I'm a lousy cabinetmaker and it would take me a very long time to get right. I simply don't have the time to do it properly without taking that time away from my business, and I know exactly what *that* would cost me per hour! So expediency will probably win out, and I'll just have to work some more hours to cover it. I can rationalize anything, and I'm one heckuva lot more accomplished working with metal than wood...

Despite the fact that I'm such a wimp, I have found some hushbox plans in discussions over on the prorec site. Here's an example thread:

http://www.prorec.com/prorec/prorec...399cd04451627b6986256977005efb6d?OpenDocument

I wish I hadn't sold my old Bruell & Kjauer SPL meter when liquidating the old studio. The Rat Shack thing I got for $40 is utterly useless for anything approximating low level measurements. I may have to check the catalogs and snag a new meter that'll get down to proper noise-floor levels...

 

[skippy]

Okay- the Mystery of the Screaming D1624 is now partially solved, and I have very good news for Fostex D-series HDR owners.

I ripped mine apart last night, and discovered that the vast majority of the noise that I object to is actually coming from a teeny little 40mm tubeaxial fan set up to cool the drive carrier. This cooling rig was clearly added as an afterthought, because it is an absolute kluge: the fan is rigidly mounted in the middle of an undamped, unsupported 22ga sheetmetal bracket about 4" x 5" that hangs over the top of the drive carrier. This large bracket resonates with any vibration of the fan, and the whole box then rings like a bell. Worse yet, the fan operates in essentially stalled air, which means that it vibrates even *more* because of the self-generated vortices that the blades are running into.

In short: IMNSHO, I could eat a handful of sand and _puke_ a better cooling arrangement. No thought whatsoever was put into making this unit acoustically quiet.

Today's project is to attack this on several fronts. I intend to replace the 40mm fan (a bad idea to begin with, since there is ample room for a larger, slower-turning fan) with a thinline 50mm CPU cooler fan which I'll run at half-speed. This will move more air than the 40mm thing run wide open, and should be vastly quieter! The thinline fan will actually have some room for its exhaust stream to dissipate into, so it won't be stalled all the time.

I'm also going to mount it in foam to keep it from coupling vibrations to the bracket quite so efficiently. And I'll laminate Dynamat on both sides of the mounting bracket to damp it, and use some more of the same stuff on the false faceplate and the chassis front panel. I'll bet a beer that I can reduce the thing's noise output by 6-10dB without really breaking a sweat, and I already know that I can kill off the most offensive pitched noise source (that fan)...

I'm kicking myself for not doing this months ago.

Also: if your unit has the factory-installed balanced I/O option, you should check how they installed it. The PC board mounts to the back panel with the 6 D-sub connector jackscrews, and on my unit, they had trapped the MIDI header cable between the board and the chassis, crushing and shorting it to the chassis.

Last thing: there's nothing special about the drive carrier. It is just a cheeseball plastic 3.5-into-5.25 removable carrier rig, with standard mounting dimensions. If you don't feel like paying $60 a pop for the Fostex carriers, you could replace it with any other standard swappable IDE carrier (like the Kanguru, or whatever else you might already be using elsewhere). For location recording, I'd suggest using one of the heavier-duty cast aluminum industrial rigs...

The good news is that these are easy to work on. More later when I'm done hacking.

 

[skippy]

I'm happy to report that the operation was a complete success. I added about 3lb of Dynamat to the unit, all told: I covered the entire false front panel, the entire chassis front panel, the entire fan bracket, and about 50% of the area of the cover that didn't have ventilation holes in it. I also filled the gap between the chassis front panel and the false front panel with 1/2" open-cell weatherstrip foam for a little more damping. Lastly, I fabricated a 1/8" aluminum blanking panel that hangs on the 4 key pegs on the false front panel (where the remote/keypad is supposed to hang when not being used as a remote) and seals/gaskets the drive bay opening to prevent any other acoustical leakage. I'd guesstimate that those changes increased the mass of the front panel system by about a factor of 4, and increased its damping by easily an order of magnitude or more.

Result: I'm unable to get any measurements over 50dB(a) even with the meter in contact with the front panel! In use, it is *just* possible to hear the clicks of the drive seeking from my mix position with the monitors off- but at my normal monitoring levels, even that noise is now down in the floor. There is no discernable fan or drive whine at my mix position now. Valhalla- it no longer dominates the noise floor. I wish I had a better meter, but I'd guess that today's hackery was good for roughly a 12-15dB(a) reduction in the noise levels.

This makes it feasible for me to do vocal work in the control room, if I like (and I do like!). It is a nontrivial difference, and I'm very happy with the result for just a couple of hours' work. It may even save me having to do the hushbox.

Have at it, fellow Fostex owners: it is *absolutely* worth the effort.

 

[drstawl]

Damn! For the kind of dough Fostex is charging for their digital (drop in for tape) recording solution you'd think they would've engineered this into their product.
I hope they somehow incorporate your upgrade into their newer designs and kick down to the inventor.
We can dream, can't we?

 

[skippy]

Perhaps I should write up a development proposal for them to roll my fixes into a production-compatible state, and pitch it to them at my normal hourly consulting rates. It might be amusing to add them as a client. The smalltown boy in me jes' _loves_ trying to deal with Japanese companies.

When I originally called their tech support people and asked about acoustical noise solutions, their response was (and I quote): "Why, you are the first person who ever mentioned this as a problem!".

Right.

I don't think that the customer service folks talk to each other, let alone Japan. The chances of any input from the customer base here in the US making it back to their engineering groups in Japan is probably somewhere between "slim" and "you gotta be outta your fuggin' mind, cully"...

In production-ready form, my fixes would probably add about $4-$5 per unit in burdened COGS, and about $30K in NRE to tool the new blanking plate, retool the fan bracket, and to tool for the stamped Dynamat and foam pieces. 8 more part numbers for inventory and the BOM, two or three new process steps for manufacturing. No big shakes. They'll never touch it, though: acoustic performance was clearly not even a blip on the radar screen when they designed the unit.

Shoot, maybe I oughta do it myself, and sell retrofit kits. I'd probably only sell 20 kits all told, and lose my shirt, of course- but ain't that what the music business is all about? (;-)