My Quasi-Recording/Mix Room Build

[Myriad_Rocker]

What a weekend so far...I know I've been slacking a bit in the picture department. I've taken some already and I'm going to take more. I should have taken more as I was assembling and building but when I get into a zone or a rhythm, getting done is all that's on my mind.

The last of the staining SHOULD be happening tonight. The wifey came out and finished up the speaker stand staining this afternoon. I'm grateful for that because that means I'll be done that much sooner. The only staining that is left is the cleats for the ceiling that c7sus described. Once those are done, I'm going to start attaching the treatment, which I finished up today.

Oh, and the computer...the parts won't be here until Tuesday and the case won't arrive until Wednesday. Kinda sucks but I guess that's for the best because I still have to finish up the cloud tomorrow, hang the second front wall treatment, and remount the LCD mount.

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

Alright...so...the ceiling joists run a different direction than I had hoped or thought they did. It totally negates the whole cross member thing I was going to do. I've got a friend coming over tonight with an extra ladder to help me get this cloud hung. The real task at this point is making sure it's all centered. I'm a bit OCD and if they aren't centered, I'm going to flip out.

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

The cloud is up. Ran into some issues with mounting it but it worked out without too much hassle. Mucho thanks goes out to my friend that came over to help me. I'll have to do some touch up here and there but that's no big deal to me. I'm pretty happy with the results.

My computer parts came in! Well, everything except the case. That comes Thursday.
Unmarked boxes are the two hard drives. One is the audio drive and the other is the samples drive. My OS drive is an 80GB SSD that a friend gave to me. I'm going to give it a whirl. The bubble wrapped guy is a DVD writer.


These two pictures show how bad out of square the front wall is. My friend said it kind of looked like I planned it that way and looked kinda cool. But I'm a bit OCD and it bugs the piss out of me. Judge for yourself. I'm highly considering hiding it with some rough cut cedar.



These are 3 of the 4 stands that I made for my monitors. I hope they hold up. If not, well, new plan.


Just some of the plethora of junk (music gear) that is sharing this room while I'm building this stuff out.


Just a couple of general shots.



The first cloud in place. Like I said, I didn't do the cross beam plan because I didn't need to after I found out which way the joists ran. I thought they ran the opposite way.


My friend, Dustin, hanging the second cloud.


And it's all done! Sorry about the glaring light.


And here's to one of my best friends, Dustin! Always willing and ready to help me out! I have played music with this guy for probably 10 years and we've known each other even longer than that!


I also want to mention my biggest help and support, my wife. She's put up with me working on this stuff non-stop for 4 or 5 months. And now she has to put up with me getting it all together and running the conglomerate of tests.



Well...I'd call that phase 1 90 % complete. I'm going to clean the room up tomorrow and bit by bit for the remainder of the week. Once it's clean, I'll post up something other than cell phone pics. To be honest, my nice camera picks up too much of the dirt! HA! This weekend it's all about building the computer (oh, and my wedding anniversary). From there I'll fire up the equipment and start running some tests! That should complete phase 1 if I don't have to do any tweaks (yeah, right).

Phase 2...I need shelving for storage in that closet so I'll do that here. Phase 3 will be tweaks and additional things I need to do...like get a couch, end table, etc.

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

Starting to wonder if I need to re-think my speaker stands and consider some more mass...

 

[Re-tox_stl]

Ouch, my jaw . I personally think that everything looks awesome!! Even the crooked front wall treatment. I am very excited to see it full of gear!

Drew

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

Thanks, Drew. I appreciate that.

Well...last night I discovered that the video card I was going to use in my new recording system is AGP and my new mobo doesn't have an AGP slot. Totally my fault. I didn't bother to check the video card at all. So, I ordered a PCI Express x16 card this morning. Now I wait...more. Guess I'll put the other parts of it together and start racking some equipment. Pictures coming soon of my computer build (after I make some more progress).

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

Here's some more pics...


Here is a much better picture of the cloud.


Here's the room after some cleaning, putting the rug down, and bringing in the desk for a test fit. The pads I put on the bottom of the desk aren't very "grippy" on the racks. I'm concerned about its sliding off potential. I'll have to review it.


This is the case that I got for the build. It's a Lian Li HTPC case that has rack rails, which I have not put on yet. Looks a bit dirty in the pic...I'll wipe it later.


This is the badarse mobo I picked up. I installed the cpu before taking the pic. It's an i7 Sandy Bridge 2600.


The MASSIVE cpu fan I'm putting on. It's huge and pretty awesome.


The ram. This stuff is huge. And no, I didn't color coordinate on purpose.


With the cpu fan installed. Like I said, it's huge.


This is with the mobo and such in the case and ready to start making connections. The heat sink just barley clears the top of the case. HOWEVER...one problem...


I had to "modify" the support extrusion that mounts in the middle of the case to accommodate the heat sink fins.




Well, that's all I did today. After this stuff I went out and saw Hangover II...overall, the only disappointment of the day.

 

[Re-tox_stl]

I went out and saw Hangover II...overall, the only disappointment of the day.

Did you honestly expect it to be good lol??

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

Did you honestly expect it to be good lol??

Well, I expected more laughs. I thought the first one was good and I know that they just recycled all of the punch lines. But still. I expected a lot better. Considering I only get to go to the movies once in a great while, I wish I would have seen something else. I warned the wife ahead of time what was being said but she wanted to give it a shot anyway.

 

[Bryan316]

Hella-excellent production quality so far! Now I regret buying a desk.... shoulda just built one!

Question about the cloud. I like the woodworking for all the wall-mounted features, it looks great and is visually captivating. But the cloud looks really awkward up there with all the exposed and stained wood. What if you camoflaged the cloud, and made them completely wrapped with fabric the same color as the ceiling? Keep the eyes from staring at the ceiling? Or do you dig the presentation of the cloud so its a feature to show off?

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

Hella-excellent production quality so far! Now I regret buying a desk.... shoulda just built one!

It was more of a pain in the ass than you think. Granted, there's not one out there I would have bought so that's why I made this one. The only desk I'd consider buying for my room (if money wasn't an object) is an Argosy or something like them.

But the cloud looks really awkward up there with all the exposed and stained wood. What if you camoflaged the cloud, and made them completely wrapped with fabric the same color as the ceiling? Keep the eyes from staring at the ceiling? Or do you dig the presentation of the cloud so its a feature to show off?

The appearance of the cloud is how it was intended to be. It matches all the other treatment and it was done on purpose. The "exposed" wood is natural colored trim. Again, intentional. If it were wrapped all the way in fabric, it wouldn't jive with any of the other treatment and I think it'd look a bit odd. That's my opinion and since it's in my room...well, Different strokes for different folks.



On another note, I'm getting around to building the computer bit by bit. Just got my video card in today and I've been taking my sweet ass time. Mostly because I have a honey-do list a mile long since I'm sorta almost done with the mix room.

The hard drive cage. Really glad it came with some rubber iso mounts. Never had these before but I bet it'll help with some vibration noise.



Next two are just overkill pics for the sake of pics! Two WD Blue drives with "whisper quiet technology". These are the recording and samples drives.





The DVD drive with a multi-card reader. The cage was a bit of a bitch to deal with. Wish they would have included rails like my old case did. That way you didn't have to deal with precise depth bullshit.



And here's the SSD OS drive shoved up above the multi-card reader.



The PSU I snagged. This is the second time I have used this in a build. Love this PSU.



And it comes with a velvety bag like Crown Royal.



And here it is, all in place. There's more space inside the case than this picture shows. Wherever I could get cables out of the way of airflow, I tried to. Lots of zip ties and logistical shoving.



Didn't get a pic of the video card but it's a bit run of the mill, I guess. I'm not big on snazzy video cards since I don't game or anything. It's a Radeon 5570, which is more than plenty for me.

Hoping to get some pics of gear IN THE ROOM by the weekend.

 

[Bryan316]

Hmmm.... snazzy machine ya got there. What PC chassis did you get? The rubber grommets are definitely a good idea.

We need to upgrade to ProTools 9, and we intend to start a PC from scratch. Having plenty of HDD bays means a big tower, but I really dig your side-by-side bays/cages.

Are you sure that heat sink fan isn't going to disappear into the future when that thing hits 88mph? Heh heh... maybe open a Stargate portal.... heh heh...

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

What PC chassis did you get?

It's a Lian Li PC-C33B case. It's marketed as an HTPC case but I see it as more of a server chassis/HTPC hybrid. It comes with rack rails that screw onto the sides. That, coupled with the fact that it's a Lian Li, is why I got it. Here it is.

It doesn't have a ton of spaces for HDD's, though. Max you could put in would probably be 5 HDD's if you also had a DVD drive. The actual HDD cage only holds 3 drives. The other cage holds one extra between the top and bottom bay and you could maybe put one in the top bay if you wanted to bad enough.

But I don't need tons of bays. I only have two HDD's and one SSD. If I add any more (likely for backup purposes), I'll use external drives.

Are you sure that heat sink fan isn't going to disappear into the future when that thing hits 88mph? Heh heh... maybe open a Stargate portal.... heh heh...

I'm betting on it. I have to get back to 1985, Doc!

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

Well...I'm not happy right now...

The mobo that I got has some sort of defect and won't boot up if RAM is in either of the B slots on the board. I hate it when a company can't ship something out without it being DOA. Now I have to fucking wait more.

 

[Bryan316]

Until then..... more pics of that machine!!!

 

[Jeff_D]

so... what about backup drives? you are planning on regular backups, right?
My normal PC build now is at least 3 drives...
(1) for programs, windows (c
(1) for data / music files
(1) to make a nightly backup of the data/music drive. If you're on Win7, fBackup is a good free backup utility. There's some good ones for XP to. Just set it up, and the machine does an automatic backup every night while you sleep.
Then, I usually do an external backup once a month or so (which I'm due about now, so thanks for reminding me).

Studio looks great by the way. This has been a fun thread to follow.

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

so... what about backup drives? you are planning on regular backups, right?
My normal PC build now is at least 3 drives...
(1) for programs, windows (c
(1) for data / music files
(1) to make a nightly backup of the data/music drive. If you're on Win7, fBackup is a good free backup utility. There's some good ones for XP to. Just set it up, and the machine does an automatic backup every night while you sleep.
Then, I usually do an external backup once a month or so (which I'm due about now, so thanks for reminding me).

Studio looks great by the way. This has been a fun thread to follow.

Thanks. Appreciate it.

I'm going to be doing backups, yes. Probably not nightly because I won't be using the studio that often. I'll probably just back up my sessions at the end of a day when I've done some work. I have an external 1TB drive I plan to use for that. I have 3 drives in my system. OS, Audio, and Samples.

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

Got the computer going with a new motherboard. Found out that one of the hard drives I have is bad, though. Now I'm going to have to RMA that...ugh. Sick of this shit.

 

[Myriad_Rocker]

This system build has seriously been plagued by problems. I just tried to install the drivers for my video card and when Windows restarted, it went to the System Recovery application. It tried repairing but never could. Tried it a few times...nothing. Now I'm going to have to reformat a practically fresh installation of Windows.

 

[RICK FITZPATRICK]

Sick of this shit.

You and lots of other people too. Newegg customer reviews are full of DOA responses...and they ain't pleased. When I first started researching MOBO's for my DAW, the overwhelming majority of users recommended the Gigabyte x58 UD3R. But when I started looking over the reviews, I was astounded by the number of people who recieved DOA boards. I even posted my astonishment on a few other forums regarding this conundrum. Turns out, Gigabyte had to make a Revision but only after so many people were less than thrilled with Gigabyte support...and said so publicly.

And it ain't just MOBO's either....TV's, HDD's, memory,...hell, all kinds of products from all kinds of manufacturers are being shipped DOA. Tells me something about "corporate ethics"..which in reality is an oxymoron.

I'm finally installing all the components in my modded cases today. Took a week to build all the DIY HDD adapter decoupling trays. I found a really cool suspension idea using a suspension product called Stretch Magic... here...
SPCR • View topic - Suspending hard drive w/ Stretch Magic (picture)


Here is a pic of someone elses way of doing it directly in the Optical cage

However, I want my HDD's removable from the front, so I modded the Optical adaptors by building another tray that the suspension bands could hang from. I used regular rubber bands as a test. I'll be picking up the Stretch Magic this morning from a local fabric store. Can't wait to get this damn thing done. Here's some pics of the adaptors and band support brackets. The square holes are for air movement as there is a fan on the bottom of the Optical cage to pull air from around the HDD's and direct it into the main Crossflow fan right below it.

Here's the band support bracket

Here it is in the Optical adaptor

The PATA HDD in the pic is only for testing. The real ones are SATA drives

And here's an INCOMPLETE section showing the fan location...most of the model is HIDDEN for this view.

This solution works fantastic. Completely decouples the drives from the Cage/Case


Here's a pic of the adapters in the computer

Anyway, good luck with your computer Myriad.