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Rackmounts for Musicians?
williwilli asks: "Musicians face a multitude of challenges in this day and age, yet there are a number of musicians also trying to work towards the future. One constant challenge in almost any profession in money. With CPU's continuing to advance at a rapid rate, many musicians are finding computer-based software synthesis to be much more cost effective than traditional hardware synthesizers. While some musicians are using portable systems, the lack of expandibility limits the systems capabilities in terms of synthesis, multitrack recording, etc. While one could always throw more computers at the problem, many users will no doubt find a rackmount system provides much more capability and expandibility. As such, what insights might the Slashdot crowd be able to provide towards building your own rack? Is shockmounting necessary? Are parts readily available, or are there any 'open-source' CAD files out there? Are there music-specific materials, designs, or tips to recommend or avoid?" Would rackmounts for a mobile musician really differ so greatly from rackmounts made for a small server cluster?
A friendly netizen provided me with this great link for building racks, which also links to some other pages about building PA speaker cabinets and various other related stuff; there is a lot of good info there.
;)
It doesn't cover much about shockmounting though... and I need some sources for parts (not the plywood obviously..the hardware)
best wishes!
willi
An in-progress discussion on the exact same topic with the exact same submit text, done by the same person, can be found at K5, here.
The K5 piece has a number of useful responses.
A while back, I needed rack specs, and had a bitch of a time finding them, so after I found them, I whipped up some layouts. Here's a PNG showing dimensions for everything; it'll render at true size on 72dpi monitors.
;)
Linky
I've got a 300dpi version, but no way am I posting that on Slashdot. And no, it's not rackspecs300dpi.png.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
For my system I am planning to use something similar to this hardware setup:
19" Rack -- Depth????
6U for PowerMac
1U for MOTU 24I/O
1U for MOTU MidiExpress XT
2U - 3U Drawer for LCD monitor
4U for Mackie 1604VLZ Mixer
2U for Drawer USB Keyboard, Mouse, Mackie BabyHUI, Contour ShuttlePro (Drawer?)
(~16-18U)
plus XRaid (3U), a drawer for parts, cables, and stuff (1U), etc.....
I would like to be able to accommodate 1U for 24+ channel an analog bridge and 2U for Rackmount UPS batteries, but this will probably make the unit larger than I would like
Anything I am forgeting?
Not affiliated with them, just an extremely happy customer. Check out spinserver for the best damn rackmount cases there are.
I've had this sig for three days.
This article was OK. I thought it could have used a few more links.
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First, I wouldn't build the rack myself. I would buy a good prebuilt one like an Anvil or SKB (Musicians Friend has an SKB 6-space for $70 right now).
From there, you can either buy a good rackmaount PC chassis, which will be expensive, or you can modify a standard case to mount in a rack. If you can pick up a tower that's just under 19" tall that should work. You can find raw materials for the bracketry at your local hardware store, or you can look up a local small machine shop and work with them. Small machine shops are great, because they usually have very knowledgable machinists who can be a great help if you don't really know what you're doing.
Of course, if you're going to spend that kind of money you can just buy a rackmount case. Kontron has some nice ones that will accept an ATX motherboard, but they start around $800. I'm not sure what kind of shock-mounting the ATX ones have. I've only used their backplane-based systems, but those are pretty good. You'd probably be looking at something like the 4-space Omnix 400 series to accomodate your PCI cards. With a 6-space rack that leaves a little storage space to pack your keyboard, mouse, cables, etc.
Regardless of what case solution you go with, you are definately going to want something more than just a single screw holding your peripheral cards in. If you go with a modified standard case that will mean constucting some sort of custom bracket to hold the other end of the card down. An industrial chassis like you'd get from Kontron should already be set up for that.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
When you rackmount your musicians, they can't fall over drunk on the stage and damage their instruments. OTOH, they do tend to whine a bit ... or is that just feedback?
On the upside, a lot of rackmout hardware is built around DC power versus AC -- 48 V DV power supplies and distribution blocks are used extensivly in Telecom and from discussion with my Hack musician cousin DC sources are prefered over AC for noise considerations.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
I dunno about building your own, back when I needed such a thing I just bought a small one from Musician's Friend or a similar store.
There are also (high-priced) music studio furniture companies that will make anything you like.
Whatever the case (pun), I'd recommend getting some kind of power line conditioner, even if you're just in your bedroom studio, because the subtle clicks and pops caused by noise on the power line are VERY annoying and unprofessional if you're recording.
They used to have one with built-in lamps to light up the front of the rack, they probably still do (haven't been into music-making for a while unfortunately).
I dunno how shockproof it needs to be. I've literally dropped rack-mount stuff from the back of a truck with no problems other than scuffs and lost buttons/knobs....'course these days everything is so sensitive....
Why?
Because most people on Slashdot are OVER 40 YEARS OLD.
Phew.
Gotta get out of this grandpa stew.
You betcha, well, that is if your roadie is gonna toss your rack like he is gonna toss your Marshal quad. Solid-state == fragile-state, just think of your hdd platters :-)
If you're on the road a lot, you'll probably want to get a Musician's Valet...
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For those musicians and recording folks who use Apples (like me), this would be a perfect excuse to try an Xserve. A 1.33GHz single-proc with a gig of memory and 2 60GB ATA drives would come to $3574, with the ATI video card and two free PCI slots for inserting digital audio cards.
A little pricey, perhaps, but it would make one heck of a core for a digital recording studio, especially if you paired it with one of their RAID arrays for storing digital audio.
For those less-expensively-inclined, a dual-1.42 GHz G4 Desktop with a 120GB drive and a gig of memory would run you $2949, and you can buy a rackmount kit for it from Marathon Computer for around $200...
I have some experience with using musician rackmount racks with computer hardware which may help those trying to do the reverse.
I like to purchase musician rackmount racks because they are cheap (at least compared to computer racks) and come in a variety of "packable" sizes.
I have two 'fuzzy' ones that I use in my office -- one has a 1U power distribution, a 1u ethernet switch, a 1u KVM switch, and a small 1u server. This leaves 1u for cable management and a 802.11 router. The other contains my 1.5u Tivo Series 2, a 1u video switch, an 2u amplifier, a 1u DVD player, and a 1u power distribution.
I have a 3rd hard case, with front and back 'lids' that cover the the faces of the rack, that lock with a padlock and are shippable. I use this for conventions.
First, be very careful with the screws -- the screw holes for musician racks may be compatible with those for computer racks, but they appear to use a different size threading. You can ruin your rack by forcing the wrong type of screw.
Second, musician racks typically are far too shallow to use with most computer equipment. Be sure to order the deepest you can find, which typically with be 17" -- even that will not be deep enough for many computer rack-mounted devices, in particular rackmount PC cases which tend to be much deeper then 17".
-- Herder of Cats
one good tip
stay with pentium, while amd works well with sometimes with audio cards. The pro audio ones have issues with amd, or intel's celeron (who doesn't have issues with celeron) ram is another issue. Just make sure its bare bones but powerful
Sarxious