Thomas Dolby’s blog continues to induce rabid gear lust. After drooling over Mr. Dolby’s live rig and repurposed vintage MIDI controller, we now get a glimpse at Johnny DeKam’s live video rig. (Kevin Johnsrude caught this one, and reminds us that “envy is one of the seven deadly sins.” Better keep that in mind.)
Actually, we can divide this into “things to envy” and “things to note.”
Sticking your desktop machine into a flight case doesn’t require a PC. You knew some high-end Mac audio customers would come up with something. Mike Salera writes us from the pro audio department at the legendary NYC Mac shop Tekserve. He’s got just the solution:
We recommend the folks at Nashville Custom Cases, who offer the “Pro Tools
Case” ($1,625) and road-ready cases for the Apple Cinema 20″ display ($525).
Cheap? No, but neither is the rest of a serious touring rig, and note that customers include Sting and CBS Studios. (Not sure Sting bought this case specifically; they do all manner of custom cases. And yes, they’re based in Nashville, or at least nearby Brentwood.) Thanks, Mike!
Bless Cakewalk. While most of the music software business lags behind on the latest computer tech, these guys are out on the bleeding edge. They’re one of the first developers in any product category (not just music) to take advantage of the 64-bit edition of Windows. And they’ve been busily testing all the high-end PC laptops, desktops, and rack-mounted machines for a quick encapsulation of how they’re performing. The machines they like include some systems built for pro audio, like the Rain Recording systems we’ve been talking about, as well as some mainstream boxes from Dell, HP, and Alienware. They even share audio card details and the setups they’ve used at trade shows:
Wallace Winfrey follows up on last week’s story on rackable PCs for music with more tips for building your own PC case. Add a 64-bit AMD CPU and a PCIe audio interface, and you’ve got a serious performance beast for audio production.
The case/power supply maker Antec has a couple of rack-mount enclosures targeted at the musician called the “Studio Series”. There’s a 3U model and a 4U model, called suprisingly enough, the Take 3 and Take 4.
Reader Nat Slater, aka 601 (see band page and hear some tunes on his MySpace page) responds to our ongoing racked-PC rig series with tips from building his own rig:
Love the blog; thought I would chip in on the current run of articles about rackmounting PCs. I have just done the same thing after many weeks of research. Like most people looking at this, my budget cannot stretch to a laptop at the moment, so rackmounting my current PC ([AMD] Operton 165) seemed like a cheaper idea. I also needed to mount up my mixer as the idea is to live live with my band and be able to mix vocals/instruments through the computer as well as turntables, etc.
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