The Studio Desk

Actually, there is no such thing as a "studio desk." If you live in the UK, you might call the console itself a "desk," but that's not what I am referring to. Instead, I'm speaking of a piece of furniture that holds all your equipment and allows you to work productively.

Hmmm.

Mostly, consoles and keyboards come on their own stands, and everything else comes "rack-mountable." This suggests that what you have in your control room is a console on legs, a keyboard(s) on legs, plus a bunch of 21" wide steel towers called "racks." If you are deeply engaged in the, er, analog side of things, you also may have roll-around multitrack and 2-track tape decks as well. Oh, yeah, throw in a chair or two. Where's this so-called desk? It isn't there.

Instead, you have a bunch of housings and stands for electronic gear that are useful for little else. And the manufacturers of said electronic gear make little, if any, effort to have their disparate pieces of equipment go together into a neat package, other than in "racks." Recently, of course, we have added the personal computer to this mess, and of course it isn't really designed to go together with anything, particularly anything having to do with audio. But, like a cowbird crowding everything else out of the nest, it does require a place, er, make that places, to sit - nice big flat surfaces where you must spread out the keyboard and the mouse for use, set up the monitor to stare at, and set up the CPU so you can load key disks into the floppy disk drive so that you can actually use the computer (I'm not going to talk about the alternative to key disks here - that is at least an article by itself).

What this means is that your control room is good for holding electronic gear, and not much else. The racks, consoles and tape decks certainly have no miraculous acoustical qualities, and mostly they resonate, rattle, reflect and wreak havoc on recorded sound, while adding their own mechanical noises to the induced low-level auditory mayhem. If you've done it the normal way, there's no place to spread out paperwork, there's no place to put the computer monitor, there's just all these goddam racks standing around screwing up whatever "good acoustics" you managed to design and build before you put the equipment in the room.

Frustrating! Doesn't anybody else think about this stuff? Mumble, mumble, rant, rant!