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Hardware

Rackmounts for Musicians? 26

Posted by Cliff from the racks-you-can-take-with-you dept.
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?
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Rackmounts for Musicians? More

Rackmounts for Musicians?

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  • A friendly netizen provided me with this great link for building racks [colomar.com], 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
    • 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
    • I've built a portable rack, of the sort constructed with plastic-laminated ply, aluminum extrusions, stout handles and locking hasps. It was a reasonably fun project. I'll not do it again.

      First, it was more expensive to buy a pile of parts than to purchase the same parts pre-assembled from Starcase, Anvil, or their kin.

      Second, I had to put it together myself, excluding a not-insignificant amount of my life from other -- potentially more-fruitful -- ventures.

      Third, Starcase-and-friends have the process
  • 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 [kuro5hin.org], here [kuro5hin.org].

  • See also... (Score:3, Informative)

    by wka ( 23275 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @08:58PM (#5634910)
    The same question was asked in this article [kuro5hin.org] at kuro5hin (apparently written by the same person who submitted this Ask Slashdot question).

    The K5 piece [kuro5hin.org] has a number of useful responses.

    • "The K5 piece [kuro5hin.org] has a number of useful responses."

      So in the interest of achieving a balancing number of useless responses it was also submitted to Ask Slashdot.

  • Might help out... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jonny 290 ( 260890 ) <{brojames} {at} {ductape.net}> on Monday March 31, 2003 @08:58PM (#5634911) Homepage
    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 [brotherjames.net]

    I've got a 300dpi version, but no way am I posting that on Slashdot. And no, it's not rackspecs300dpi.png. ;)
  • Not affiliated with them, just an extremely happy customer. Check out spinserver [spinserver.com] for the best damn rackmount cases there are.

  • hyper (Score:1)

    by BortQ ( 468164 )
    This article was OK. I thought it could have used a few more links.

  • Some thoughts (Score:3, Informative)

    by MrResistor ( 120588 ) <.peterahoff. .at. .gmail.com.> on Monday March 31, 2003 @09:30PM (#5635059) Homepage
    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.

  • 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?

  • DC (Score:1)

    by Xunker ( 6905 )
    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.
  • 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 [tonylevin.com]...

  • 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,

  • Some experience (Score:2, Interesting)

    by herderofcats ( 409703 )
    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

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