Midimonkey Productions - Almost Done!

frederic · Post by **frederic** » Mon Dec 05, 2005 12:48 pm

My "home studio" with a "pro theme" is most of a garage loft, which is about 23'x13' give or take. The garage loft was "finished", but not really well. Most of the old 1940's insulation was "stolen" by mice that the prior/original owner of the house ignored for decades, and the walls/ceilings were covered in broken, cracked, rotting, falling down tongue and groove cedar panels. I like cedar, but not when it's in such horrible condition. A good loud sneeze in this place would result in paneling falling from the ceiling, or worse - mouse poop falling through the gaps between the boards, into your coffee.

And there were some structural issues I wanted to address as well. The ceiling in some areas was only 7' high, and in other places, a mere 6'4" or so. I'm 5'11" barefoot, so I found it a bit claustraphobic.

Any, here is the initial design, which I strayed off quite a bit. The sofa in the picture isn't there, and instead that's the area I placed all my synthesizers, on stands.

It's almost finished, finally. I have four small pieces of moulding to paint and hang, some wiring to do, an outlet cover to add, a woofer to replace, and I need to clean the darn floor.

If you want to view the studio in a 2.5mb "360 view" it's kinda lame but the best I can do with my digital camera (takes about a minute or so if you have broadband):
http://frederic.midimonkey.com/studio/IM001423.AVI

And of course, insted of forcing you to wait for 300 pictures to load in this thread, I'll instead link you to my new homepage and you can click through at your leisure:

http://frederic.midimonkey.com/_index.html

When you arrive at my page, on the left is some menus, just click "studio" about 2/3 of the way down.

Hope you're all well, and happy holidays!

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 12:15 pm

Congrats, Frederic, it's been a long time coming - just one thing; are you sure that "light at the end of the tunnel" isn't really an on-coming train??!?

Steve

frederic · Post by **frederic** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 12:23 pm

Yeah, it's been slow going, especially the last year since my wife and I had our first child. So I try to sneak away every so often and work on stuff, but most of the summer was spent doing outdoor automotive related projects, roof repair, and the rest of the usual homeowner stuff.

The there is light at the end of the tunnel, and its not a train. I checked. No "B&O RR" imprinted on my forehead when I peeked

Did some of the non-audio cabling yesterday and today....

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I just have to make a wooden cable tie truss so I can remove that white metal rod I'm currently using to keep the weight of the cabling off the blue electrical box. Two deck screws and a piece of 1x3 oughta do it

Oh, and if you're not following my disorganized threads on homerecBBS, here are my homemade cable hangers for the garage ceiling:

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I should have the non-audio stuff done by bedtime tommorow, then I can start on the audio snake cabling. I started desoldering patch bays this evening, but in an hours time I got five jacks clean. I guess the last time I installed these I shouldn't have wrapped the wire around the lug three times, soldered, then covered with heat shrink tubing

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 2:42 pm

Yeah, permanent fixes have a way of biting me in the ass too

We definitely share a love of square tube for projects though

frederic · Post by **frederic** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 11:52 pm

I have stockpiles of the stuff in all different sizes. And some round stuff for exhaust and intake manifolds too. Much easier to mate square stuff. Takes longer to cut it then weld it.

Post by **sharward** » Fri Dec 09, 2005 1:36 am

Awesome!

I'm going to do something similar inside my laundry room very soon, which is a bit of a "CAT-5 Central Junction" kind of thing where I have my WiFi router.

frederic · Post by **frederic** » Fri Dec 09, 2005 3:06 am

That's just for the studio.

The house is wired to a central point in the basement....

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Fri Dec 09, 2005 4:47 am

Jeez, Frederic, with an air-to-water heat exchanger you wouldn't even NEED a separate water heater...

frederic · Post by **frederic** » Fri Dec 09, 2005 5:03 am

Heh-heh.

The basement is nice and toasty, even with an open window on the other side of the basement. This is why I like compaq equipment... it's been in those racks running for almost four years, never failed, dispite it being about 80 degrees in the basement right now (it's 35 outside), and during the summer even with the four basement windows open, it approaches 100 degrees very quickly. Yet the server farm seemingly is happy.

Aside from web, mail and other typical internet-related services for myself, this server farm is what I store all my music/video data on. 1.97TB of contiguous storage available for recording. Makes shuffling data between PC's, laptops, and external drives a thing of the past. And since it's a rock solid raid array, with two automatically consumed "spare" drives, I can lose three hard drives of the array without losing one byte of data. And, if a drive does fail, I simply yank it, plug in a new one off the "spare drive shelf", and it rebuilds. Don't have to reboot, don't have to run any configuration utilities, and it's totally transparent to Linux.

And, completely constructed of use bits and pieces off e-bay for about $2k. Best $2k I've spent in years.

Anyway, that's what is in the left rack. The right rack contains two servers - one is a game server/backup server, and the other server in the rack is an internet radio station which I haven't streamed to in years. I used to stream stereo digital audio right from my console, through ethernet, right to the internet station for people to listen to live mixes.

Harald F. Metzner · Post by **Harald F. Metzner** » Fri Dec 09, 2005 5:11 am

You are totally commited to all technical stuff, right? Your doing really great, i like the dashboard built for your car, very entertaining!

Keep on with that good word.

BTW, you say five TMD1000 in the text, but aren't there 6 on the photo?

Best wishes, Harald

Post by **sharward** » Fri Dec 09, 2005 5:27 am

I work in IT myself, and that is just insane!

Thanks for sharing!

If heat ever becomes an issue, a mini split in there would do wonders.

frederic · Post by **frederic** » Fri Dec 09, 2005 8:44 am

Harald F. Metzner wrote:You are totally commited to all technical stuff, right? Your doing really great, i like the dashboard built for your car, very entertaining!
Keep on with that good word.

BTW, you say five TMD1000 in the text, but aren't there 6 on the photo?

Best wishes, Harald

yes, there are six. I probably have a typo. I tend to make lame HTML at like 2 in the morning, its the only time I can sit down for any length of time

I'll fix that, thanks for pointing that out!

Dash is cool, huh? It's even nicer now that it's in the truck, and I don't have to drive around with the cluster on my lap. I just need to paint it the correct interior color, slap in the computer thing which is on the workbench, working properly, and mount the GPS and wireless antennas in a fiberglass "aero box" on the roof, which I haven't made yet since it's so darn cold.