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Electricity

One of the biggest issues in any studio, whether it’s for personal use or for hire, is the electrical setup. For many of us, the home studio is relegated to whatever room (or part of a room) is not being used by other inhabitants of the house. Consequently, we share the electrical panel with the household appliances and other sources of line noise. It’s not always easy (nor inexpensive) to isolate our gear from the noise pollution in the electrical system, so usually we just live with it.

Before we started our remodel, my studio was in a small in-law unit behind the garage. Besides being uninsulated, and therefore nearly uninhabitable in the middle of winter and summer, it didn’t have grounded power when we moved in. I eventually had a ground rod installed and wired into the electrical panel, but the house’s electrical system remained underpowered overall, and the results could easily be seen and heard. But that’s about to change. more

Preamble
This week, all the hubris around the supposed game-changingness of a unitasking, I/O starved Apple iPad completely overshadowed “Digidesign’s Open Letter to our Users.� Or did it?

In this memo, the parent company made it official yet again: Digidesign is Avid (which is how the opening screen reads when you launch Pro Tools 8, by the way). Okay, fine: goodbye to the name Digidesign. So where’s the news, besides the fact that there will be no more Digidesign.com as of April 12, 2010?

At Winter NAMM this year, Digidesign didn’t have any products or demos in its newly Avid-branded booth. The big news, besides an announcement of its Pro Tools Instrument Expansion Pack, was that Hal Leonard was now a major distribution partner of the Avid brands. Employees at the Avid booth handed out flyers directing interested parties to H-L’s booth, where there was a corner dedicated to the Avid brands. This tiny piece of real estate did not instill confidence in the community of Pro Tools users attending the show. Certainly, Avid’s empty booth didn’t instill confidence in a product that wants to remain the industry standard for pro recording. And although this week’s Open Letter was meant to instill confidence in the user base, it didn’t do so for me. more