It's really exciting to see work in progress like this with the in-depth explanations and photos.
Awesome work Diginerd.

Effero

So it's been a while. Lots of work has been going on though!

Firstly this has taken longer than I had anticiped, and certainly would have taken even more weeks to date had I not spent at least 4 hours a day in there weekdays and 8+ hours each weekend day.

If you're going to follow my lead and really build something out budget for LOTs of time. Then double that, and double it again and you may have a very rouch (under) estimate of how long this is going to take you.

So, what's been done now?

1. All electrical work complete.

I installed a secondary breaker panel just for the studio. Each wall has its own 10 amp breaker, and each rack has a 20 amp breaker. In addtion there is a 240V circuit in there with outlets between the racks and up at the front of the room. This last feature is a product of my moving to the USA from the UK and having large amounts of 240V gear. It's a pain (and electrically noisy) to have multiple 110V > 240V upconverters.

2. Carpet is installed.

I put in Interlocking foam tiles first, and glued them to the unfinished concrete floor with impact adhesive (Nasty nasty stuff!). The improvement to room accoustic as instantly obvious, as it helped cut a lot of the high freqency reflections. I left a gap of about 1/4 inch between the foam and the walls on each edge for the next step:-

On top of that I fitted industrial/office carpet. I cheated here and again glued it down at the cornets, and fitted a small kick board all around the edge to make it look pretty.

Overall the floor is very comfortable and looks great. One minor (well not so minor!) problem is it's now so soft that a wheeled chair won't slide around with me sat on it. This prompted me to buy a hardwaring plastic mat to slide around on.

3. Trimwork done

This is purely aesthetic and gave the room a feel I was not expecting. I installed very small ceiling coving all around the top edge of the room and around the hole in the wall for the racks. I mounted it to the walls, but not touching the ceiling. I then used very soft caulking to finish the edge to the ceiling. This helped preserve the design of having no walls or the ceiling touch. All the joints are caluked and there is a small gap between all the sheetrock underneath. These soft breaks reduce transmission of vibration and help with the sound isolation of the room from the rest of the house.

4. Physically installed rackmount gear.

This is the fun bit. Actually getting gear into the room! I spent many happy hours muching about with templates of the gear in Visio, adjusting where everything will sit, and then bolting it all in.

Actually seeing it after staring at it as templates on a computer screen is awesome.

Pics coming

damn... this is like a fairy tale... and i like that! shoot more pix dude...

Sounds like things are coming along!
Can't wait to see more progress pics.

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Sorry for the brief wait before pics. I needed to sort out my hosting.

So, firstly, here's my rack plan as a PDF and for those wanting to steal the template and edit for their own nafarious rack design purposes as a Visio VSD

And now some before / after pics of the room with the first bits of gear installed...

"View from the bottom of the stairs"

Before



After



So you can clearly see my evil plan for getting all my gear into the wall, which avoids lots of floorspace being lost to racks, and lots of messy cables in the room. You can also see the toilet flange on the wall where the cables will come through to the mixer.

Speaker positioning and all treatments are not final, this is just getting stuff in..

I also intend to take apart the Jerker Desk that the mixer is sat on and cut down the excess steel columns either side. I didn't do this earlier as I wanted to make sure I had the height correct first. Good job I didn't as I needed to change things once I got it in the room.


"View from under the Window"

Before



After



In this shot you can clearly see the two rows of Track Lighting (Remember months ago I said I wanted it?!) along with a double touch dimmer panel next to the door. You can also clearly see how high from the floor I mounted the power outlets, the unit on the wall to the left contains tie lines to the patchbay. Decks will eventually live here..


"Back Towards the Window from the Opposite Side"

Before



After




You can see how much smaller the electrical closet is. Unfortunately I couldn't eliminate it altogether, but it's infinately better than what was there before.

The desk to the left of the shot will have the computer screens on it.. Remember the computers WON'T be in the room..

"And Finally" (For now!)

This last one has no direct correlation with the first lot of photos. As it couldn't be taken then because would have been stood in the old electrical closet.



From here you can clearly see the door that leads to the rest of the basement and around to the back of the racks...

I have to say I'm pretty pleased with the way it's taking shape..

Last edited by Diginerd on Jul-10-2006 at 17:01

Looks great, well done!

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Well done mate, looks shit hot

You say the computers won't be in the room. So you have more than one computer; is one for the net and one for audio or something?

Computers:-

1 x Apple G4 1.25GHz Dual, with Pro Tools Mix3+ (Mix Core, 2 x Mix Farm, 1 x DSPFarm) for Recording & Mixing

1 x Home Brew PC, Athlon Xp 3200+ for PC Based tools, and sequencing (Soon to be seriously upgraded to some form of Quad Core)

1 x Fossilized Apple 7100/66 with 2 x NuVerb Cards (basically gives me a Lexicion 480L) which is accessed via Timbuktu

1 x Dual Piii/800 used for streaming Audio & Video to / from the studio

1 x IBM Laptop, primarily for internet access, but also doubles as extra CPU grunt for writing.

quote:

Originally posted by Diginerd Computers:- 1 x Apple G4 1.25GHz Dual, with Pro Tools Mix3+ (Mix Core, 2 x Mix Farm, 1 x DSPFarm) for Recording & Mixing 1 x Home Brew PC, Athlon Xp 3200+ for PC Based tools, and sequencing (Soon to be seriously upgraded to some form of Quad Core) 1 x Fossilized Apple 7100/66 with 2 x NuVerb Cards (basically gives me a Lexicion 480L) which is accessed via Timbuktu 1 x Dual Piii/800 used for streaming Audio & Video to / from the studio 1 x IBM Laptop, primarily for internet access, but also doubles as extra CPU grunt for writing.

5 computers lol, just as well they're not in the room then.

Great work Diginerd...

There's actually a bunch more too, but they're in a server rack in the garage.. :-)

The brain of the Mixer is also a rackmount computer, which adds to the noise