19 January 2009

Apollo Studio Cabling (Part 2)

Last week I spent a lot of time cabling the studio. As I showed before there is a lot of UTP in the studio. Coming from the main rack in the server room there is a bundle of 14 CAT6 UTP cables coming in a bundle to the studio. My electrician mounted this neatly on a patch panel that I mounted in the mean time in one of the lower 19 inch cabinets under my main studio desk. I just have to pay attention because in the main rack they are numbered 11 to 24 and in the studio they are numbered 1 to 14. This is because the first 10 connections in the main rack are going to the power cabinet upstairs. As you can see this is an old picture since here still the aluminum 19 inch profiles is mounted in the cabinet.

In the mean time it looks like this. In the center cabinet you can see a power distributor on top with a build in Volt and Ampere meter. This way I can see if I don't overload the UPS that will be feeding the studio later. I actually have two of these one for the right side and one for the left side of the studio, since they can only run 10 Amps a piece and I have 16 Amps in total. Below that is a keyboard drawer, I'll get back to that later. Below that two strips with power switches. These are also on the left and the right. From here I can centrally switch everything on and off. I divided everything into logical groups for myself. Last week I wired all the power outlets that I mounted in the lower cabinets to these switch panels. Then you see the patch panel that was installed before and shown in the first picture.

There will be another patch panel below that to mount all the blue UTP cable on that is still sticking out there. These cables run to outlets in the cabling guiding system that was installed the floor. This way I can patch stuff over UTP from the central desk to other places in the studio. In the picture on the left you can see the same thing from the back. The gray cable is going to power outlets in the same cabling guiding system. Hopefully my electrician comes tomorrow or the day after to finish this job. This is actually the last thing they need to do. Not that I can't do it myself, but I already payed them to do it ;) And I'm currently very busy with other things. There is a lot of cable that has to go in there.

Here is a picture of the back of my desk. To get behind there I need to crawl under the center part of my desk. And that is quite low now with the extra drawer mounted. But once I'm behind there I can stand up. There is about a meter of space between the desk and the wall. As you can see I mounted some hooks under the upper and lower part of the desk to run the cabling through. And believe me this is only a very small part yet ;) I started hooking up my two PC's in the studio. So what you see there now is some power, DVI, Ethernet, USB and a few audio cables to my monitors. I did hook up some audio because I'm testing out different monitors. This evening I will start hooking up my Word Clock cabling and some digital audio.

I tried to make a picture of the back side of my main studio PC, but it was quite dark there, so it is not very sharp. But I guess you'll get the idea. There is already a lot of USB connections on there. I have a lot of equipment that uses USB, but as far as synthesizers I only connect the ones to this PC that need Midi Clocking for accurate timing. All other machines that only use USB for editing or updating software will be connected to my other PC. There is a limit in the number of stuff you can connect in terms of midi drivers to one PC. And since I had trouble with that in the past I'm trying to avoid this now. Some synthesizer need a separate USB 2.0 port like the Virus TI that does audio streaming over USB, but other only do little data and can do USB 1.1. Most of these I connect through USB hubs. There is actually more USB hubs that you can see in the picture here. Well enough for now. I'll update you later in the week on the progress of this cabling project.

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