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I have a music studio here in my home, for my own personal use. It's fairly common for high-end studio hardware such as signal processors, and synthesisers to b

by ajxs 4y ago

I have a music studio here in my home, for my own personal use. It's fairly common for high-end studio hardware such as signal processors, and synthesisers to be made in rack-mountable format. At some point I figured I could save some desk space by building a studio PC in a 2U rack mounted case. This meant I could keep it directly together with the rack-mounted power conditioner, audio, and MIDI interfaces that it connects to. I figured this was hitting a studio ergonomics home run, as the heart of my studio now fits in 5U of rack space. As the years have gone on, I've found it less and less convenient to build my studio around a bulky 19" rack. These days I'm looking at ways to shrink this setup further. Less and less mid-range hardware is rack mounted these days too. I'm not about to get rid of my setup anytime soon, but I won't be building another one like it when it comes time to upgrade. In the home studio world this kind of setup is much more common. I think a lot of people are attracted to the aesthetic of rack-mounted studio gear. I know I definitely am. I personally don't find this setup as ergonomic as desktop modules though. I think manufacturers are coming to the same conclusion.

parker_mountain 4y ago
I used to have a rackmounted pc, and audio interface, personal server, etc all on one rack. Over time, things shrunk, and it made more sense to put it all in a well ventilated spot in the garage with a 10gbps link to my office. I could have used wifi, the bandwidth would have been fine, but where's the fun in that ;)
- tkanarsky 4y ago
  You could also throw a Thunderbolt interface card in it and fish a 50m optical tb3 cable through the walls to a dock on your desk :)
  - pbronez 4y ago
    That's the dream! Going another step, I'd love to have a Thunderbolt to fiber adapter without having everything baked into a single cable. These products exist, but cost $5000 for each end https://www.atto.com/products/thunderbolt-adapters/thunderlink/thunderbolt-to-fc/TLFC-3322-D00 https://www.atto.com/products/thunderbolt-adapters/thunderli...
    - tkanarsky 4y ago
      Yikes. Probably such a niche product that they slap a pretty beefy FPGA and some off the shelf NICs together which can't be good for the BOM cost haha. On a similar note I recently worked with an adapter that carries USB 2.0 over a cat5 cable. It doesn't even do that good of a job -- jitter is pretty high, which makes it useless for our use case of controlling a laser cutter live from a host computer -- but guess how much it costs? $736! https://www.blackbox.com/en-ca/store/product/detail/usb-20-extender---catx-2-port/ic402a-r2 https://www.blackbox.com/en-ca/store/product/detail/usb-20-e...

by ajxs 4y ago

parker_mountain 4y ago

I used to have a rackmounted pc, and audio interface, personal server, etc all on one rack. Over time, things shrunk, and it made more sense to put it all in a well ventilated spot in the garage with a 10gbps link to my office. I could have used wifi, the bandwidth would have been fine, but where's the fun in that ;)

tkanarsky 4y ago
You could also throw a Thunderbolt interface card in it and fish a 50m optical tb3 cable through the walls to a dock on your desk :)
- pbronez 4y ago
  That's the dream! Going another step, I'd love to have a Thunderbolt to fiber adapter without having everything baked into a single cable. These products exist, but cost $5000 for each end https://www.atto.com/products/thunderbolt-adapters/thunderlink/thunderbolt-to-fc/TLFC-3322-D00 https://www.atto.com/products/thunderbolt-adapters/thunderli...
  - tkanarsky 4y ago
    Yikes. Probably such a niche product that they slap a pretty beefy FPGA and some off the shelf NICs together which can't be good for the BOM cost haha. On a similar note I recently worked with an adapter that carries USB 2.0 over a cat5 cable. It doesn't even do that good of a job -- jitter is pretty high, which makes it useless for our use case of controlling a laser cutter live from a host computer -- but guess how much it costs? $736! https://www.blackbox.com/en-ca/store/product/detail/usb-20-extender---catx-2-port/ic402a-r2 https://www.blackbox.com/en-ca/store/product/detail/usb-20-e...