Confronting the studio beast

Nothing tops the joy of new studio hardware acquisitions. Whether the result of a diligent saving regime, or a hard fought eBay victory, the arrival of new pieces of gear in the studio is a time of celebration. The future looks bright, the world is our oyster, and soon we will be creating the kind of productions we always knew we were capable of once we had the necessary equipment. And now we do. There can be no excuses anymore!

And then the reality sets in. We must confront the beast head-on. Wiring and installation. It should be a straightforward job, so why is it so hard? Here are the primary challenges ..

Specifying the cable: Installation miniature or mic cable grade (it's all about the diameter)? Multicore pairs or multiple individual lengths? If we choose individual lengths we will need to gather them together somehow. Why are there so many choices and why do the costs never follow any logic?

Cable length: Too long may be inconvenient as our coiled snakes amass at the bottom of rack cabinets, but too short can be a disaster (you know you're going to re-site the gear someday, us studio owners are always reconfiguring).

Connectors: Premium XLRs can be expensive, but is the economy option going to be good enough?

Patch bay: Do we have sufficient unused capacity in an existing patch bay or will we need to buy a new one? As more and more studios close their doors, and professional mix engineers move to an in-the-box workflow, there are an ever increasing number of secondhand patch bays available on eBay. But most have an existing decapitated loom attached which will take hours of work to desolder. It's a choice between 50 bucks for a secondhand item or 250 bucks for a brand spanking new one.

Soldering: The first half hour is always a disaster as you find your rhythm. There then follows several hours of eye watering work in which you try to maintain concentration by repeating the maintenance engineers chant "123, external live return, 123, external live return".

Lead labelling: Why does the labelling machine always run out of tape halfway through the job? And why do we always forget to attach the labels sufficiently far enough down the cable so that we can easily unscrew the connector cover and slide it off when we find that in our sleep deprived exhaustion we have forgotten to actually solder our carefully stripped and tinned cables to the connector pins.

Patch bay labelling: Always, always plan and label the patch bay before soldering the loom to the terminals. We swear those connectors get closer every year!

Loom restraint: There's no way we can allow our heavy looms to put strain on our precious soldered connections. So it's tie bars, cable guides and cable tie time.

Are we done? Nope. Testing, fault finding and fettling next. And the finally, maybe, just maybe, we can sit down, read the manual, and find out just exactly what the new gear actually does!

Thanks for watching and reading

FairFax