19" rack

[Steve Jones]

On Apr 23, 10:29am, Dan Higdon wrote:
 Subject: Re: 19" rack

> Yup, that's been my (limited) experience.  The only problem comes
> when you want to expand horizontally.  Of course, you could make a
> "left handed" version to sit next to the first one, if you only wanted
> to expand to 2 columns. :-)

[Yeah, Ric, I like what you've done.]

That's exactly where I was going.  One would have two
mirror image racks with all the patching in the middle (it
might even be fun to hinge them in the middle, resulting
in a huge, completely immovable box 8^).  Of course, it
becomes less than optimal after that.

However, just churning figures around in my head, I figure
a person could get about 6 voices in two 3.5 foot racks;
that's not *too* bad.  And *that's* using Ric's spacing.
Although you guys are speaking from experience and I'm
merely dreaming, I still (stubbornly 8^) think I could
compress it down a bit.

I was looking at the Formant panels.  If one used the same
area per module panel that they do, one could compress
the spacing down by almost half.  Of course, that may or
may not be practical; I don't know.  I'm going by memory,
but Ric's Ernie must have 'busier' front panels than
the Formant.  The Formant's spacing seems very reasonable
to me; maybe it has fewer knobs, switches and jacks, etc
than Ernie.

Another thing I've been considering is going 'half-normal'
with my patching.  That would eliminate a lot of excess
patch cords.  If a person used quarter inch plugs, they
could work like a half normal patch bay, i.e., making
an explicit patch would open the normal connection.
(Actually, there'd probably be two jacks, one that opens
the normal and another that does not).  If banana plugs
were used, there might be a switch to open the normal.
Is this anathema or what?

Using this scheme, adding a third rack could still be
pretty clean since all the normalled connections could be
run behind.

but what do I know?
steve