I drove 1000 km in the rain with pneumonia, luckily the hotel had a sauna and good heating, I found some fisherman's friends at a truckstop, I think they literally saved my life. After a couple of days rest and antibiotics I'm again at the studio organizing for tomorrow's installation.
The patch bay rack will have a Prism ADA8HD, a Prism AD16HD and a I|O192HD (24in; 8out Prism; 8in; 16out I|O192) at the top of the rack with space for another future 2 space converter (I want to end up with 4 Prisms for DSD and dump HD when I can, not that it's bad sounding but it only works with PT), the XLRs and Dsub25s are to connect these, the converters are at heads up range so I can easily see the meters (unfortunately with the Prism you can only view 8 inputs or outputs at a time so I can only see 1-8 or 9-16 on the 16 in version), when he's sitting, the 5 patchbays are at my assistant's shoulder height. I originally wanted to make a patch bay only rack but it was already so big because of the LK25 connections that I decided to put some other vital gear in there. Under the converters will go a consumer quality universal disc player. I left space for 2 more patch bays and under that are 4 spaces left for the future (Speck ultramix? but I might want that in a seperate box, the converters are easy to get out of the rack, I'm rambling here, sorry) there are 16 xlrm, 16 xlrf and 16 trs jacks on the front as well as 10 iec outlets for external gear (rentals or host).
On the back are 6 panels with 5 LK25 connectors each that are used to tie 48 mic lines and all external racks (2x Millennia HV3D8, 4x Millennia STT-1, TLA stereo grey compressor/mic pre, TLA dual channel grey EQ/mic pre, 16 channel Control|24 line and mic, Control|24 monitor ins and outs, aux ins and outs TB, LB, slate (which I always use), 16 channels for Fuman HDS16 (cue sysem).
There's space for 3 more LK panels. I thought of using larger connectors but as I played with the thoughts of future changes and being able to redirect portions of my signal flow with the repatching on the back instead of the front, I decided to stay as modular as possible (I could never fill up the bigger connectors as I wanted and each rack would need a different size and the bigger cable wouldn't fit through the tracks I laid on my walls and about 5 other reasons). There is a panel with 8 xlrf and 8 xlrm and another with 8 trs jacks for the monitor sends and various other studio ties that are of a more permanent nature.
The coolest thing about the patch bay is that there are 6-3x1 passive mixers. John LaGrou gave me the schematics (he gave me schematics for a cable, I applied these to points on the patch bay).
I came up with 8kVA by adding all of the power consumption of all my amplifiers and multiplying by 1.3 then adding all the power consumption of the rest of my gear then taking this sum and multiplying by 1.2! The total is what is allowed by some kind of norm that I need to meet to be insurable. By norm I don't need to have a UPS or an isotxfmr but if I have them I need to meet that norm. 5 1030s plus the 7050sub and 2 ADAM S4c's (I've finally decided on my mains, I have a small studio, these would be mains for me) and I have to provide backline power in the studio and on location recording that I set up as tracking and fixing sessions (not concerts where it's already provided). All the rest of the stuff doesn't add up to much. I already have a smaller system (1.5 kVA, not an online though) that I can move around for smaller gigs, I need to get a txfmr to follow it. 8kVA is about 5kW, a little more, here thats a little over 20 Amps. I definitely don't want one that's too small, it's one of the devices that will assure me that I'm going to get paid!
Talking about reliability, my next huge move will be 32 channels of line splitters or mults(?) and a Genex 9000 with 32 tracks for backup but that won't be for a while, I still haven't decided on a good back up system (not computer) any advice would be welcome. (I'd prefer not to just double everything as thi hurts the budget, i need something clever and foolproof)
My first gig with these cases (and the new systems, moved from PT 4.2 to HD3 Accel, recently) is in the studio next monday with an Italian Reggae group
After that there's some Accordian jazz, some free jazz, solo piano (I have a very nice 1949 Schmidt-Flohr with Schwander action that's vey similar to a Schimmel, upright) and there should be some film sound design pre-production happening in about a month. No Road gigs yet as I've not yet told anyone that I have a big system because I want to do a couple of run throughs first and I'm waiting for my first cable reel/splitter system to arrive, I want to get it tested and form some methods so I can be ready for the summer.
I originally found Gearslutz a year and a half ago when I had pneumonia (again, I catch it from my kids and don't realize what it is untill it's too late) and had nothing better to do, since it has helped me a lot to research this new studio plan I had (which wasn't a lot different from my old studio, only bigger, better and more reliable). I really like this place and want to thank everyone here. There are not too many Gearslutz here where I live. It's a little like being back in NY and gabbing with the other guys working your business. Ciao