I resolve to do more DIY work building gear, gadgets, and accouterments for my home studio. This is a resolution I'm sure a lot of readers want a part of. So we are going to attempt to do a monthly project every month of 2008.

Ground rules for selecting our group projects--nothing that requires esoteric tools or manual skill. Everyman projects. Gonna try to keep them relatively cheap, too. For the inaugural project, I'm thinking a simple passive device like a transformer DI, a re-amper*, an MS decoder, or something similar. Practice some soldering, practice making a case, no active components to worry about overheating, and generally useful for the studio.

So the floor is now open for nominations for January. When we have some suggestions, I will put up a poll. After voting, I will be working my ass off to get some instructions together with a bill of materials and pictures.

Bear

*I realized much later that the non-hyphenated variants of this word may cause a certain fellow to apparate on discussion boards to protect his trademark. So now it is edited to avoid hassles.

All by my-self
Don't want to be
All by my-self
Anymore . . .

Come on folks. We will start with simple, simple stuff. A box, some jacks, a transformer, and some wires. Can be a cheap transformer, too--there are some pretty decent under-$30 ones out there. Tools would be a soldering iron and a drill or punch tool for the holes.

Bear

A DIY headphone splitter/loadbox that can be used with a low powered amp (Crown D45, etc...) ...similar to the ProCo HP4...

Something to replace these cheezoid infested Samson headphone amps stinking up the place.

Also, if you are in the mood, a 16 channel DIY summing unit WITH INSERTS!

Good ideas.

Headphone solution: my guess is more people would buy a new headphone amp rather than buy a power amp and do DIY for headphones. How many people still have a separate power amps instead of using powered monitors? Maybe using an integral chip power is a better solution, but of course that makes it a harder DIY. The passive setup is generally a simple enough project, though.

Summing--unbalanced inserts or balanced? And L/R only or panpot? It's probably a doable DIY to work up to, but configurations might be particular to the user's needs. Maybe doing it as a building-block approach--design the bits and let people combine them as needed. The toughest part about this is all the soldering--that and buying all the jacks and doing your wiring harness. I suppose we could figure out a DB25 thing.

Keep them coming, people.

Bear

Okay, I've been thinking of the things that can make a year of DIY. Here are some ideas:

Gobos--Jetphase suggested this one. Probably needs better carpentry than I have, but I can work on those skills. Really good to have some flexibility in your acoustics. It used to be that these were used for isolation to reduce bleed, but it doesn't need to be that way. RealTraps does their gobos either both sides absorbent or one side reflective. Cool possibilities possibilities for creative micing come to mind. Trouble here is I would need to know how to build these things. Got plans?

Bass Traps--DIY plans from Ethan Winer from a pre-RealTraps article. Good ground rules, and likely more out there of this vein. Again, carpentry is the tough skill.

Shockmounts--no soldering, handy stuff to have. And pop-filters--again, useful stuff to have. The real trick for this stuff is making it look professional and not too kludged. But we kludge as we need to.

Racks--The Amazing $22 Ikea rack with absolutely no carpentry required. All you need to do is screw on rack rails.

Direct Box--I'd like to do something like the full-featured Jensen schematic though maybe with a cheaper transformer. Simpler is easier, of course. Maybe have two levels of project so people can choose how far to go.

Re-amplifier/reinjector/non-intellectual-property-infringing-level-matcher--Jensen has one and there's the one by NewYorkDave of the Lab. Remarkably similar in concept and execution, though the NYD one uses the much more budget-friendly Edcor transformer.

Mid-Side Matrix--passive with transformers is an easy project, and it's hard to argue going passive with good iron. Jensen has not just one but two schematics. Again, need not buy Jensen iron, but every so often it's nice to kick back something for all then handy schematics they provide.

I've got other ideas in active circuitry. Some of the stuff would be guitar-type pedals that the DI and re-amplifier help make into useful studio tools. There are some nice tweakable Fuzz Face circuits out there where you can do things like adjust the bias voltage. And if you can get stomp-box compressors hooked up right, they can be beautifully lo-fi.

Any of this sing to people?

Bear

Okay, then. The project is the Ikea racks. Why? I've already got the furniture and my wife is more interested in me being tidy than anything else right now. So a good way to start off the New Year on a couple good steps.

Happy New Years, folks!

Bear

Wow...I need to get out more...that IKEA rack looks like a stupidly easy problem solver, and with my straying further and further away from software, the racks are filling up faster than I can keep up with....

To answer a couple questions, though...there are some of us fossils that still prefer the sound of older designs or application specific designs without power...thus power amps are necessary..I just got a near mint Crown DC300A (rack hog!!!!) that will be powering our newly configured mons in a few weeks...this frees up some of the smaller/less than wonderful amps (Samson, Alesis, etc)...

So how many IKEA racks are you building, and how many are you sending me? Don't MAKE me have to put my pants back on and come up there to get them>

I'll look into the headphone thing some more, especially if it's just us building.

I'm making three racks--the same number of Otari boxes as will be going on top. (Nice solution, eh?)

And I'm not sending you any--it's quite clear which part of DIY you don't understand. You can, however, click on the "Buy Online" button on the product page.

(And if you were even conscious enough to find your pants, as soon as you left flat land you would get confused and scared and go home. )

Bear

funny!

Bear,

Here's my article.

http://deltaboogie.com/blog/modules.php?na...icle&sid=90

I use this all the time. No volume controls or anything but it works.

Probably needs to be fleshed out with some pics and parts for a good DIY.

Thanks,

Hairy Larry

That splitter does seem pretty straight forward. How hard would it be to put a volume pot on 0ne or more? I am thinking about this for running the monitors out of it as well.

I have built my own rack from heavy plywood, but the IKEA think looks pretty nice. On mine I have 2 battens across the back, the top one has 2 screws to which I mounted a power strip.

My project for January is an FM transmitter for the house. Not a studio project. The people here with iPods seem to want to listen opn radios where ever they may be. Bought the kit and now with some free time....

I think the DIY idea is a good one here. I will try to participate.

I now have more than 16 MB of memory for my digital cam, so rest assured there will be pics for build threads.

Bear

If it makes any difference, I found a very cool schematic for a headphone module for just about any power amp - in the manual for the DC300A...will scan and post if anyone is interested.

Bring that bad boy out.

Bear

Try this one...I make no claim of how well this works, nor any mods to swap out one pair of resistors to a pair of pots...

Please note this is directly from the Crown DC300A manual...