If I could do it over, I'd...

  • Thread starter Thread starter OneRockShy
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OneRockShy

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Hey all.

First post, I know, but I've been reading and learning a lot from you all so far. Thank-you for that.

I'm currently in the rough framing stage building my basement studio. Fortunately we went with 9'0" ceilings down there and I'm able to use a room-inside-a-room set-up.

As I'm approaching the wiring stage, I'd appreciate your input. I'm comfortable with what I need for the bare essentials, but I'd like to make sure my studio is upgradeable and expandable and not limited by what I did, or more importantly didn't, put behind my walls.

So, I'll put my question in two parts.

1) What are your "must have" wiring items?
2) What are your "wish I had" wiring items?

Thanks!
Sky
 
Must have:

You can never have too many outlets. I wish I had installed about 6 more than I did so I wouldn't have to use so many strips.

If you are going to have separate rooms (ie. live room, control room, iso booth), be sure to wire your feeds between the rooms with good, sheilded cable, and provision for at least 50% more connections everywhere than you think you need.

Wire in lots of drops for lighting, and do not use any fluorescent lights anywhere near your studio!! (Ballasts generate enormous amounts of electromagnetic noise that something in your studio will pick up, guaranteed.)

That's my $0.02.

Darryl.....
 
Add Cat5 between every room (including any office, bedroom, etc) that you can, and the control room. Right now you can get hardware that will let you transfer multi-channel audio thru one cat5 at 100 mb/s, plus several companies make extenders that will let you run an entire DAW based studio from anywhere (within about 500 feet) with just an LCD, Keyboard and mouse. This means that you can do your own vocal/guitar playing in the iso booth, and start, stop, record, play back, erase, etc, all without getting off your chair in the iso room.

Along with what Darryl said, keep all "wall warts" as far away from any audio lines as you can - if those things put out any more crap, you could cook your breakfast on them... Steve
 
Make sure all your outlets are either on ONE circuit, or if you need two circuits, that they ARE THE SAME PHASE. Use star-grounding, too. That means an individual ground from your panel to each outlet.

Buy nylon, spec-grade outlets too. They'll never crack and can take years of abuse. I prefer nylon plates too over bakelight. Stainless steel is even more durable.
 
star-grounding

Hey guys, thanks for the input... keep it coming!

c7sus: As far as star-grounding goes, do you mean just running a separate ground wire from each outlet back to the ground bus at the panel? If I'm understanding correctly, I'd run the power just the same, putting a few outlets per circuit, but not utilize the ground wire in the power cable. Instead I'd run just a single wire (likely 14/1) back to the panel from each ground. In addition, I'd intended on grounding two outlets at the control room desk to a completely separate ground than the panel itself.

Steve: Awesome tip with the Cat5! I'd planned on running it to the live and control rooms anyway for teledata, but there's a chance I'd have not run a line just between the two spaces. I've just started researching pc DAW's (I operate on a VS880EX right now) and I will DEFINITELY keep this extension idea in mind!

DDev: Regarding the feeds, I'm planning on purchasing a quality 50' snake and using a portal between the live and control rooms. Since you've brought up the shielding, I'll definitely keep the portal as far from power sources as possible. I'm planning on using the snake so I can take it with me to record outside the studio... bad idea?

I've purchased my lighting: halogen wall sconces and halogen can lights... even with my limited experience, I've learned the perils of flourescent lighting... and dimmer switches.

Sky
 
Whaddya mean "a completely separate ground than the panel itself."???

That's a bigtime no-no!

The reason being that each service has a SINGLE grounding point.

You want all your outlets to have the same grounding point in the panel. If you use seperate ground points you run the risk of a difference in potential between the two points. This will cause audible line noise problems and increase the possibility of ground loops.
 
Re: star-grounding

OneRockShy said:
Hey guys, thanks for the input... keep it coming!

c7sus: As far as star-grounding goes, do you mean just running a separate ground wire from each outlet back to the ground bus at the panel? If I'm understanding correctly, I'd run the power just the same, putting a few outlets per circuit, but not utilize the ground wire in the power cable. Instead I'd run just a single wire (likely 14/1) back to the panel from each ground. In addition, I'd intended on grounding two outlets at the control room desk to a completely separate ground than the panel itself.
Click to expand...

The seperate ground idea is (as C7sus stated) a big time no-no.

As far as the star grounding goes - it works great - but you need to have isolated ground receptacles in order to do it (PIcture hospital grage receptacles here).

The body of the receptacle and the ground are seperated.

Thus you need a seperate ground wire to run back to the panel. Each outlet becomes a 4 wire connection - Positive - Neutral - ground and isolated ground.

- understand though - this is for EACH RECEPTACLE -

Although you can daisy chain the receptacles from a power/neutral and common ground point of view - each one has to have it's own isolated ground perform a home run to the panel - otherwise you will defeat the purpose -

Rod
 
You're right about that. I missed the isolated ground on the outlet itself.............:(
 
Onerock, you're welcome - the cat5 thing is (I think) only gonna expand more - next phase is here but not full swing yet, don't remember what the new designation is, but it's gigabit ethernet (first was 10baseT for 10 megabit/second, then 100baseT, for 100 megabit/sec, now it's "1000baseT", or gigabit. QSC and a couple other companies already have live sound wiring boxes that move up to (I think) 64 channels of 24/48 digital audio on one cable. Talk about cleaning up wiring clutter... plus, as I said, anything you can control from your 'puter, you can control from 500 feet away, with only a pair of extender boxes and a floating keyboard, monitor and mouse. I plan on using one of those "BRC remote" type rolling stands, like you see in most of the pix of big studios sitting next to their million$ consoles, then setting up a patch bay in the CR with two cat5 cables to each area (just in case)

On your grounding subject - Rod and I went through this in depth with another member over on RO - here's the (4 page) link if your interested -

http://www.recording.org/cgi-local/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=34;t=000831

There's a bunch of code quoted there, it's all NEC 2002... Steve
 
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