Uffornica Homestage in concept
She is a premium home entertainment audiovisual item featuring home theatre decoding, music playback and live instrument inputs with an integrated mixer and amplification
I have been developing an all tube based front end for my upcoming commercial bass amp with the premise that a live player should sound like a studio recording and not boom clash brash. I named this instrument Uffornica. The name is alluding to things like euphonic distortion and the almost sensual satisfaction of gorgeous music. The bass amp has an aux input for play along tracks and pro speakers from a different audio industry, in a one box 2.1 arrangement. As I developed this project, I found that this bass amp is making many parts of my home entertainment and home studio setup redundant, e.g. front channel poweramps, subwoofer, mixer, USB music player, Bluetooth receiver and everything that goes into connecting them all together. See we enjoy plugging in an instrument or mic and jamming along whenever the urge hits us
This inspired me to separate the electronics from the amp cab and develop it further where it takes the main duties in my particular home setup and the resulting concept I am naming Homestage
Project objectives
Form the hub of home theatre and studio
Remove clutter
High quality audio components
Dressed worthy of such a centrepiece
Dress up
I would like to offer my criticism of audio equipment aesthetics. A web search for amplifiers brings up industrial or lab look in the industry. Usually hard silver or black units. This is so boring, everything really looks much like everything else. Whether in hi-fi or pro audio. The internet is littered with clone build projects. So many are trying to make their guitar amp or Bluetooth speaker look like a Marshal. Music is a beautiful thing. The makers of makers of music, in other words the instrument makers, totally get this. The instruments are things of beauty, featuring a massive variety of colours and aesthetic ideas. What these instruments and their recording pass through look boring
If she is worth the best effort of DIY, then she deserves the best effort to be dressed fine
My design process
Usually I form a 3D, detailed mental image of what to build. I call this MAD (mind aided design) and then I go on to whatever lengths needed to bring it into existence, marrying form with function. The second setup for me is to transfer the MAD design to a 2D drawing, which is called a general arrangement or GA. This allows me to then start developing individual parts and working out fit to scale the GA. Then I usually use CAD if required to draw plans or just do it from MAD
Many of the chassis components will be bespoke e.g. panels, knobbery, switchery, PCBs and light effects. Build material will feature fabrics, aluminium, brass, acrylic and wood. I will be emulating the look of a process known as Menakari for the knob colours, which a colour coded for ease of use. The lightening effects are to complement our home entertainment light effects as well as for ease of use in a darkish environment, much like Roland's Aira lineup. A Roland JDXI will sit to one side of this and a Roland MX1 to the other. Together with a Mac mini desktop and a large screen TV. These and our string instruments are all the items that I want to take up space in the living area
These are the GA 2D drawings of Uffornica Homestage, I'll refer to it as Uffornica HS as well
She is a premium home entertainment audiovisual item featuring home theatre decoding, music playback and live instrument inputs with an integrated mixer and amplification
I have been developing an all tube based front end for my upcoming commercial bass amp with the premise that a live player should sound like a studio recording and not boom clash brash. I named this instrument Uffornica. The name is alluding to things like euphonic distortion and the almost sensual satisfaction of gorgeous music. The bass amp has an aux input for play along tracks and pro speakers from a different audio industry, in a one box 2.1 arrangement. As I developed this project, I found that this bass amp is making many parts of my home entertainment and home studio setup redundant, e.g. front channel poweramps, subwoofer, mixer, USB music player, Bluetooth receiver and everything that goes into connecting them all together. See we enjoy plugging in an instrument or mic and jamming along whenever the urge hits us
This inspired me to separate the electronics from the amp cab and develop it further where it takes the main duties in my particular home setup and the resulting concept I am naming Homestage
Project objectives
Form the hub of home theatre and studio
Remove clutter
High quality audio components
Dressed worthy of such a centrepiece
Dress up
I would like to offer my criticism of audio equipment aesthetics. A web search for amplifiers brings up industrial or lab look in the industry. Usually hard silver or black units. This is so boring, everything really looks much like everything else. Whether in hi-fi or pro audio. The internet is littered with clone build projects. So many are trying to make their guitar amp or Bluetooth speaker look like a Marshal. Music is a beautiful thing. The makers of makers of music, in other words the instrument makers, totally get this. The instruments are things of beauty, featuring a massive variety of colours and aesthetic ideas. What these instruments and their recording pass through look boring
If she is worth the best effort of DIY, then she deserves the best effort to be dressed fine
My design process
Usually I form a 3D, detailed mental image of what to build. I call this MAD (mind aided design) and then I go on to whatever lengths needed to bring it into existence, marrying form with function. The second setup for me is to transfer the MAD design to a 2D drawing, which is called a general arrangement or GA. This allows me to then start developing individual parts and working out fit to scale the GA. Then I usually use CAD if required to draw plans or just do it from MAD
Many of the chassis components will be bespoke e.g. panels, knobbery, switchery, PCBs and light effects. Build material will feature fabrics, aluminium, brass, acrylic and wood. I will be emulating the look of a process known as Menakari for the knob colours, which a colour coded for ease of use. The lightening effects are to complement our home entertainment light effects as well as for ease of use in a darkish environment, much like Roland's Aira lineup. A Roland JDXI will sit to one side of this and a Roland MX1 to the other. Together with a Mac mini desktop and a large screen TV. These and our string instruments are all the items that I want to take up space in the living area
These are the GA 2D drawings of Uffornica Homestage, I'll refer to it as Uffornica HS as well
Attachments
Hi man, I am an experienced neon sign maker, e.g. the neon peacocks for Capitol Theatre in Sydney. Rest assured that I am competent around the safety requirements for high voltage hot glass tubes. Chassis peripheral details will come later when I have explored what beautiful forms I can give to available materials. I have only worked out the Knobs so far
As for the Simpsons comparison, I have presented with more class, manners and thought than that oaf. It is your own ability to understand the concept. May I point you towards vintage sideboards containing tube amplification, radio, record player, quad surround, mic input, guitar input. Believe it or not, some ethnicities love plugging in into their consumer grade home audio equipment. Most Japanese domestic market consumer Hi-fi feature live inputs, Even in the elite Home cinema receivers
Try thinking along the line of..... put on a live concert Blu-ray.... have a couple of Sols..... plug in your instrument while your partner grabs a mic and go nuts
With your way of thinking, that would mean either playing the disc through the aux input of an instrument amp or dragging in ugly carpet and plastic vinyl covered unshapely boxes into your lounge room with a mess of cables going everywhere. That is untidy and more along what your Homer reference would do. We are more capable than that nowadays and well able to house all that separate bits in one common pretty chassis
Try on the attitude of "how can I" rather than "why I shouldn't". It's very healthy and usually leads to innovation and new options
Thanks and regards
Randy
I would prefer 'just because you can doesn't mean you should' . Most domestic hifi speakers will die very quickly with a bass guitar plugged into them. And they won't sound right either as the guitar combo is an integral part of the instrument. So unless you put a modelling processor in with all the knobs and buttons required you will have very disappointed people. You have a lot of electronics needed for the home theatre part combined with lots of tubes. It's not a good idea, but fill your boots if that's what YOU want.
Hey man, that only just shows that you haven't plugged an instrument pre into a hi-fi line input. Most hi-fi equipment play just fine. You really don't have to use a model of a bass amp/combo, as most combos aren't actually bass devices. They are more like sort of bass amps. Hi-fi on the other hand is capable of a lot cleaner and sweeter rendition
It might make what you are saying look bad, but have a look at this story. Two days ago, I received an email from my daughter's teacher that Jiya cannot bring her bass amp to school any more unless we get a safety certificate. The principal said the teacher seemed devastated, as Jiya's amp sounds way better than the school's fender amp and anything the other schools kids brought to the interschool workshops and concerts. This amp was making our school sound much better than others. Today I had the amp tested by a licensed electrician and certified, so all is well with the universe again. Here is the open palm, that amp is a Logitech z623 subwoofer part hidden behind pretty panels and wearing a simple mono homemade jfet pre without any eq or modelling or effects. Just a volume pot on the preamps input. We auditioned this at our local music store, and it beat everything in the store for bass definition, authority and tone to the point where the owner wants it in the shop. How do I tell him it's only a pc speaker dressed up? He's world would fall apart!! There is a whole thread here about that build
Again, acoustic guitars do not need modelling. They sound fine just mic'ed. Neither do mics and keys. As for electric guitar, maybe what you listen to needs to be shaped to someone else's equipment model, but the audio signatures required for the music that we listen and play, just the waa in most mixer effects units and simple eq is all that's needed
We run in the other direction from shrieking electrics. That's just us though, why let your imagination limit the Uffornica? Look up send and return systems and how they are used for inserting external effects units. Do you not get that on the Uffornica, the mic from an amp/combo and the DI can both be mixed in and balanced against each other? Or the guitar just plugged in straight and used with the dedicated channel effects and a tube channel strip specifically designed for guitars
Also, where do you get the "lots of electronics needed" for HT? Do you not know that a little PCB contains very comprehensive HT decoding and processing? That only the required number of poweramps just need to be hooked up to that PCB?
I must say an excellent first response to Uffornica as we can clear up ignorance and misconceptions and limited thinking right now
Probably did it before you were born.
which is exactly what you DON'T WANT
Doubtful
And the problem is? We have something in UK called PAT which everything has to be tested to.
in a domestic setting they don't need any amplification.
Clearly you are out of your depth here.
Sorry Ignorance is not with me. Good job I didn't comment on your ergonomics.
I noticed. It's somewhere back in the other thread where I was asking for opinions on it that pretty much went ignored also
Hi Randy, I am not an engineer nor a guitar player, however I do have a background in designing and marketing consumer audio products, some successfully, some not. The difference between them has typically been whether I did enough work to establish demand for the product before building it. There are also some essential considerations I don't see in your initial post, so with the aim of helping this product succeed, since you mention wanting to commercialize it, here are some key questions for any commercial product development project:
My advice to you and anyone else looking to start a business: Speak to as many people in your proposed target market as you can before starting - no fewer than 10 and ideally many more, to make sure they want and are willing to pay for what you're building. Don't sell them on a vision - get their honest feedback on a simple and clear explanation of what the product is. Surveys are good too.
Good luck! This certainly looks unique and I agree that audio gear tends to look very similar, especially in the pro audio arena. Speaking from experience, that is typically because uncontroversial designs are acceptable to the most people, and so you eliminate some risk by eliminating "interesting" design elements. But exciting and unique designs can work as long as there are enough people on the same aesthetic page. You could call interesting looks a "high risk, high reward" strategy when it comes to industrial design.
Now, whether anyone will buy the Uffornica Homestage, I leave the answer to the only people that matter, your future customers.
- How many units do you need to sell to consider this a successful product?
- How much money do you intend to make (related to above)?
- How much will the product cost you to build, per unit? (include everything including shipping, taxes, parts, assembly, etc.)
- How many people will buy this product? How do you know?
- What are those people willing to pay for this product? How do you know?
My advice to you and anyone else looking to start a business: Speak to as many people in your proposed target market as you can before starting - no fewer than 10 and ideally many more, to make sure they want and are willing to pay for what you're building. Don't sell them on a vision - get their honest feedback on a simple and clear explanation of what the product is. Surveys are good too.
Good luck! This certainly looks unique and I agree that audio gear tends to look very similar, especially in the pro audio arena. Speaking from experience, that is typically because uncontroversial designs are acceptable to the most people, and so you eliminate some risk by eliminating "interesting" design elements. But exciting and unique designs can work as long as there are enough people on the same aesthetic page. You could call interesting looks a "high risk, high reward" strategy when it comes to industrial design.
Now, whether anyone will buy the Uffornica Homestage, I leave the answer to the only people that matter, your future customers.
There are obviously two very different opinions here, and both are valid. There is also a LOT of room in the middle. Where a guitar or bass player resides depends a lot on what musical style they play. I have made an untold number of music instrument amps in the past 50+ years. All of them had a distinct character which mirrored the music I was into at the time. My first "DIY guitar amp" happened when I was 9 or 10 and my parents swapped their mono Magnavox HiFi for a Silvertone Stereo and I got the Maggie. I cut a guitar cord in half and connected the wires to the wires in the tone arm of the Maggie. I beat that thing mercilessly for several years and it never complained. A pair of 6V6's and a 12AX7 couldn't blow the speakers in that thing no matter what you played through it. This was a time when the Ventures, the Surfaris, Jan and Dean, and the Beach Boys owned the Miami pop music stations until four guys from Liverpool took them back. My only problem was that the Maggie didn't have reverb.
I have a DIY guitar amp that I made and use for electric guitar sounds from mellow to metal, but whenever I long for the good old days I just plug the guitar cord into the Focusrite Clarett 4 Pre (8 input sound module) on the PC and call up a sweet 60's surf music preset in TH-U (modelling software). It is also possible to create a full metal racket in TH-U but I found that having a switch on the speakers to disable the tweeters is required for avoiding headaches. It's also good to dial back the subwoofer when plugging in a bass guitar or cranking a bass heavy synth patch especially if you like a clean harmonically rich tone.
There might be some sort of "Homestage" type thing in the works, but it will not be this elaborate. The centerpiece is like one of those PC cases with a Lexan window in the side. Looking through the window reveals some vacuum tubes in the foreground with the motherboard behind them. Sort of a "the best of both worlds" kind of thing. Just for fun you can plug a MIDI controller into the USB jack and call up any soft synth in the Arturia V collection or fire up a virtual modular synthesizer via VCV Rack. It also runs Ableton Live for the studio part of the Homestage.
I have a DIY guitar amp that I made and use for electric guitar sounds from mellow to metal, but whenever I long for the good old days I just plug the guitar cord into the Focusrite Clarett 4 Pre (8 input sound module) on the PC and call up a sweet 60's surf music preset in TH-U (modelling software). It is also possible to create a full metal racket in TH-U but I found that having a switch on the speakers to disable the tweeters is required for avoiding headaches. It's also good to dial back the subwoofer when plugging in a bass guitar or cranking a bass heavy synth patch especially if you like a clean harmonically rich tone.
There might be some sort of "Homestage" type thing in the works, but it will not be this elaborate. The centerpiece is like one of those PC cases with a Lexan window in the side. Looking through the window reveals some vacuum tubes in the foreground with the motherboard behind them. Sort of a "the best of both worlds" kind of thing. Just for fun you can plug a MIDI controller into the USB jack and call up any soft synth in the Arturia V collection or fire up a virtual modular synthesizer via VCV Rack. It also runs Ableton Live for the studio part of the Homestage.
Hey man, the first line isn't the story, I can help you read that paragraph even though English isn't my first language. It's about how the regulatory issue brought the regard to light as to how a PC speaker in disguise has been shaming so-called pro audio
You would have to blind to not notice how out of depth I am. Just about everything I have asked for assistance and opinion on has been ignored over the past few months. Man, look in the subwoofer section where I asked for some help to read WinISD results. It's now up to me to trail an error and discover and learn to build this fun thing for my desktop for my requirements. Even this thread shows that knowledgeable types mostly speak to disagree
Having made a career out of ergonomics with sports equipment and receiving rave reviews in our national magazines and online ones, plus DJ'ing karaoke and reggae dub with live mic and percussion, I would love to hear your thoughts on ergonomics. My build is about the ergonomic lacks and needs that I have felt with equipment that I have used, and addressed those points in my GA. As an example, without the MX-1, reggae dub effects cannot be automated, effects and level knobs and routing have to be continuously reached for on consoles where the effects engine controls are stupidly located, and the whole console is badly lit. Seems only Roland Aira developers understand the use issue. I am basing the channel strips around my Yamaha MG12UX and changing locations and routing to address the lacks that I feel
The ergonomics of Uffornica HS should be considered along the lines of a playable instrument in the same vein as the MX-1. I haven't even presented the rear panel and foot control board for my machine yet
Your comments on ergonomics would be very helpful in determining if I am using the consoles and things incorrectly, resulting in my ergonomic concerns. The situation is one of inputting a live performer or two into a song track playing back and DJ'ing that in too. Have a look at Roland Aira high-end DJ desks to see some of where I am coming from
I hope you don't bow out, a fight is also a good way to learn, one that usually gets more contribution. Have a look at my learning to PCB software thread for example that became awesome educational material due to an argument amongst the contributors
First let me say thank you for your interest, much appreciated. I just wanted to correct that this is not meant to be a commercial product as such. It's a personal home project for our particular use that evolved from another device that is the commercial product under development
The benefit for me as that I can use various elements that I will sort out with Uffornica and pass them down to the commercial product or the DIY community, e.g. the Eric1v3 amp. I am using one in Uffornica. But until the Uffornica chassis is ready, the Eric1v3 will need a safe and secure home. For this, I am right now designing a stereo poweramp chassis as a temp home. I will be uploading the design files, so Eric's other customers can have an interesting option and make it themselves or get someone to make it or buy from me.
Please don't read any negative emotion in this medium of text. May I draw your attention to another aspect of marketing, the Flagship. If I read your expertise right, then you would be no stranger to the concept of lust and feature pass down to lower tier for marketing. I made good use of this when I ran an Australian manufacturing concern for quite a number of years
Thank you for the interest. Please post up your project, sounds interesting. Especially the PC and Ableton integration. I will be using the MX-1 for that. The MX-1 has 8 analog inputs, but no pres. Uffornica's channel inserts will provide the MX-1 with pres then fed back into Uffornica's analog channel strip. Uffornica HS concept is still very capable without the MX-1. Individual channel strip and master sends and returns will allow me to feed the Mac with a bunch of spdif dongles. At some point I will look into building a multichannel audio interface in, looking for options
Understood! I think this should be a cool build to watch. The drawings certainly promise a unique look if nothing else.
I tend to agree with other comments that it looks complex, but what's the fun in building something totally simple and sensible?
Looking at it as a flagship type of thing, totally makes sense.
These are some of the Uffornica HS parts that have already arrived. Some drop in and some modified. The speaker boxes were started some months back. I won’t be using them much past initial testing of the 7" sub drivers being used as woofers in a 2ish way with the 6.5" coaxial. I am able to execute much more creative detail with speaker boxes now, so these solid birch boxes look plain. Let's not get started on timber stability, please. I am competent with engineering the stability into solid timber to any thinness for naval architecture and aircraft levels
The new boxes under design will be shaped like Veenas with the neck disguising the external firing ports. No flat surfaces. I might use spotted gum from very old stump heartwood that is almost maroon chocolate colour. Check out the back of my Shorty bass in my profile pic. Same wood, this took me one year to carve with a scalpel on the taxi rank when we got ubbered and our industry collapsed. I would stand back against the bonnet with the dub playing in the car, carving away holding a lit rollie. Dreads, Windsor Smith razor backs, bell-bottoms and a bright red long sleeve T. Attracted more biz to my car and had plenty of tipping from passerbys in appreciation for my carving. This was in front of Sydney's most elite strip bar, Mens Gallery. As I would come up the road to the rank I would have Ini Kamoze Murder playing with Robbie's bass loading up the canyon like one way street. There was one of Sydney's most top shelf club across the road, the Ivy
Eric? Recognise anything? See the big aluminium sink at the back? Thats the 500w+500w that I would prefer to replace with an EricXXX at some point
My current Yamaha MG12XU mocked up like Uffornica HS. I will be discarding the cosmetics from most items and making my own. Things like knobs and switch faces and bezels and such
The new boxes under design will be shaped like Veenas with the neck disguising the external firing ports. No flat surfaces. I might use spotted gum from very old stump heartwood that is almost maroon chocolate colour. Check out the back of my Shorty bass in my profile pic. Same wood, this took me one year to carve with a scalpel on the taxi rank when we got ubbered and our industry collapsed. I would stand back against the bonnet with the dub playing in the car, carving away holding a lit rollie. Dreads, Windsor Smith razor backs, bell-bottoms and a bright red long sleeve T. Attracted more biz to my car and had plenty of tipping from passerbys in appreciation for my carving. This was in front of Sydney's most elite strip bar, Mens Gallery. As I would come up the road to the rank I would have Ini Kamoze Murder playing with Robbie's bass loading up the canyon like one way street. There was one of Sydney's most top shelf club across the road, the Ivy
Eric? Recognise anything?
See the big aluminium sink at the back? Thats the 500w+500w that I would prefer to replace with an EricXXX at some point My current Yamaha MG12XU mocked up like Uffornica HS. I will be discarding the cosmetics from most items and making my own. Things like knobs and switch faces and bezels and such
First task, finish the speaker boxes and hook up the Eric1v3 to test the front stereo stage running of the HT decoder board. This has comprehensive AC3 and DTS 5.1 processing and proper remote control and features an OSD via the HDMI pass through
To the fella that had an issue with this, please comfortably continue believing that this board is an item of fantasy and can never give Uffornica HS the HT abilities. Will you accept your ignorance on this matter?
The Uffornica HS chassis will take time, and the Eric1v3 amp board needs an enclosure now. So I am going to design a dedicated stereo poweramp chassis for it. I welcome all Eric1v3 users to collaborate and come up with a standard model that can work for all of us. I'll make my design files available in this thread
Erica.c
A couple of questions for you regarding your amp
1 - How comfortable are you with the board fitted upside down on an aluminium baseplate?
2 - If fitted inverted, are the two aluminium sinks ok to make contact with a common baseplate?
3 - How does the Eric1v3 handle disconnected speakers? Bad for the amp? Is there a way to protect the amp if speakers aren't connected at power on?
In MAD, I picture a printed chassis with an access panel at the bottom formed by the baseplate. Take this off and the board comes off with it. The XLR IO board stays secured to the rear panel and standby switch relocated to front panel. The baseplate to sink heat from the board heatsinks and case air volume. Baseplate cooled by a fan mounted under it. I would prefer to make the case spill proof and not allow any dust inside to the board
If anyone with an Eric1v3 is interested in things like front panel preamp controls, then let's select a design from ones available online and design that in and anything else like that
To the fella that had an issue with this, please comfortably continue believing that this board is an item of fantasy
and can never give Uffornica HS the HT abilities. Will you accept your ignorance on this matter?The Uffornica HS chassis will take time, and the Eric1v3 amp board needs an enclosure now. So I am going to design a dedicated stereo poweramp chassis for it. I welcome all Eric1v3 users to collaborate and come up with a standard model that can work for all of us. I'll make my design files available in this thread
Erica.c
A couple of questions for you regarding your amp
1 - How comfortable are you with the board fitted upside down on an aluminium baseplate?
2 - If fitted inverted, are the two aluminium sinks ok to make contact with a common baseplate?
3 - How does the Eric1v3 handle disconnected speakers? Bad for the amp? Is there a way to protect the amp if speakers aren't connected at power on?
In MAD, I picture a printed chassis with an access panel at the bottom formed by the baseplate. Take this off and the board comes off with it. The XLR IO board stays secured to the rear panel and standby switch relocated to front panel. The baseplate to sink heat from the board heatsinks and case air volume. Baseplate cooled by a fan mounted under it. I would prefer to make the case spill proof and not allow any dust inside to the board
If anyone with an Eric1v3 is interested in things like front panel preamp controls, then let's select a design from ones available online and design that in and anything else like that
Thanks for that! I'll be sure to isolate everything effectively in my build.I think can answer question 2. Don’t ask how I found out, luckily I’m an electrician by trade and get shocked all the time
If this is intended for your own use and enjoyment, then you are free to make whatever you want that is within your means to do so. I spent 41 years working at Motorola, some of that in product development. Fifty engineers in a meeting room cannot design a cell phone, since no two of them will agree on form or function. After many years of trial and error it was determined that taking surveys with pictures, mechanical mock-ups, or functioning prototypes at a shopping mall was the best predictor of product success. In reality we used three different malls, one at each end of the socio-economic spectrum and one that catered to the primarily Hispanic international trade.
Ableton Live is a Digital Audio Workstation like many others including FL Studio, Reaper, Pro Tools, and Cakewalk. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Like the name says, Live was originally intended for making live music from clips or musical scenes. A clip is a single piece of MIDI data or digitized audio. A scene is a collection of clips that can be "launched" together from a MIDI controller or keyboard. Ableton makes a sophisticated (and expensive) clip launcher and editor called Push which has been superseded by Push 2. Novation makes a budget minded series of scene launchers called Launchpads. Ableton Live has grown to encompass the typical suite of recording and editing tools found in a modern studio for editing, manipulating, of even mangling both MIDI and audio. It also comes with several software synthesizers so that it is possible, and quite common today, to make a complete radio ready song "in the box" completely with Ableton Live. You mentioned Ableton Live, but if you have not settled on a particular DAW yet it would be wise to investigate all of the possibilities before spending money. You mentioned Mac somewhere in this thread. Macs come with Garage Band which is a decent basic DAW for free. I am not a Mac user, so I have never tried it though.
The computer requirements for any DAW vary depending on how many simultaneous tracks you want to record, and how many plug-ins you want to run while making music. A plug-in is an add-on application that runs inside the DAW. Most are either instruments or effects. A typical instrument may be a software synthesizer, or digital drum set based on samples. An effect may be an EQ, reverb or delay, and you can build your own channel strip with effects.
I have my own DAW based studio. I value function over form, so it is not pretty. It has existed in one form or another for over 20 years, but the cobbled together bench / synth rack seen here has been together for the past 8 years. It is constantly changing and evolving, so it will never be finished. Running a software modular synthesizer, some other soft synths, some hardware synths including a 30 year old Roland JV-880, and recording live audio, usually a guitar through TH-U has bumped into the red zone on the CPU meter a few times, so I began looking at upgrading the three year old PC that runs it all. Amazon tempted me with a Ryzen 9 chip in a recent sale, so I ripped out the Ryzen 7, popped in the 9 and decided to make another PC with the freed-up Ryzen 7. I needed to use the 4K Samsung TV display, so that's why there is a motherboard, power supply and keyboard on the desk at the moment.
You may notice that the generic Chinacaster guitar is plugged directly into the Focusrite interface. The screen on the Push 2 mirrors the FX rack on the bottom of the Live screen. It can be used to adjust parameters of a playing clip in a live setting.
This workstation is in my basement, and is on wheels, but it has only moved a few feet in years, and certainly isn't leaving home. I wanted a similar setup on a much smaller scale. That setup is still quite unsettled. At one time I had both the PC with a 50 WPC vacuum tube amp inside behind the window in the PC case, and a portable PC in a box capable of running Ableton Live just about anywhere. Neither had any hardware synthesizer capability, and both relied on external interfaces for audio and MIDI, though the "box PC" did have a 10 WPC class D amp and a small set of speakers suitable for relatively quiet locations. Seen here overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in a very windy location, headphones were required. The "box PC" is running live and communicating with the Arturia Keystep via USB MIDI. The Keystep converts the MIDI data to control voltage and gate signals for the DIY synthesizer I call "Blue." It's seen in a hotel room where the speaker audio was sufficient. Neither of these systems are fully assembled today since Covid killed off my twice a year road trips, and the Florida trip this year was cut short by a devastating hurricane strike. The quiet spot on the beach where I often sat with a guitar, or a soft synth on a laptop no longer exists today.
It appears that you intend to build something very complex. I have been experimenting along these lines for years. I would advise you to mock up all your hardware interconnections BEFORE building any cabinetry. Test everything under the conditions it will see in use, and beyond.
It's too easy to think that all the modules you have and want will play nice with each other, run on a common power source, and accept all sorts of inputs and operational conditions for which they were not intended for or tested with. I have found this to NOT be the case more often than it is. Yes, you may get sound, but it may have a low level hum or whine, or the PC may just lock up when it's forced to eat something it doesn't like. Class D amps and digitized audio in the same enclosure have been particularly problematic, especially when powered by one or more SMPS modules.
