Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Okay, I was given a used cassette deck a couple of days ago. This is a good thing, especially considering the huge pile of cassettes I've got that I haven't been able to listen to for ages. I unplugged my Stack O' Music Gear in the office and played with geometry a bit to see how things would stack without falling over, and whether I could get away with not having to bring more furniture into the room, build furniture, or get around to making a mini-rack-thingie for the mixer (which is designed as a rack-mount unit). Then I had to go do other stuff, so I didn't have any tunes in the office yesterday.

Now I've got other things I need to do, but I'm feeling restless and needed to distract myself, so I let myself start plugging components together. Now for any sane setup this isn't a big deal, but my audio setup is a bit kludgey. So it comes down to spending a bit of time puzzling out resource allocation and signal paths.

This could be a pain in the arse, except that as a puzzle it can be kind of fun if I'm in the right mood. At the moment I appear to be in the right mood. Here's what I've got :

1. 8 channel mixer, laid out as 8 mono x 1 stereo, but I can play some games with the one monitor send, two effects sends, two stereo effects returns, tape in/out, and headphone out. Some of the outputs are copies of the same (main) bus, of course, but they've got different types of jacks to choose from. With creative knob-twiddling I can use the two effects sends together as a second stereo mix bus (but I don't remember off the top of my head whether the effects sends are pre- or post-fader).
2. 5-disc CD player, a gift from the ex-girlfriend I'm not supposed to name lest she call upon sysadmins to smite me.
3. Dual cassette deck.
4. Wee little Radio Shack stereo amplifier with phono input and two normal line inputs ("tuner" and "CD/tape") plus tape out. The CD/tape input is duplicated as a stereo mini-phone jack on the front.
5. Phono turntable, either a gift or a really long term loan from the aforementioned ex-girlfriend.
6. Guitar multi-effects unit borrowed from Spam.
7. Very old Maranz stereo amplifier with the wrong kind of power cord, grabbed off the curb, which may or may not work: inputs are "mic", "phono", "tuner", "tape", "aux1", "aux2".
8. Old Fisher tuner/amp grabbed from the curb which may or may not work -- it's got the right kind of power cord but the cord has been chewed by rats, so I dare not plug it in until I get around to replacing the cord.
9. Peavey 30W bass guitar amplifier (I have other amps, but that's the one that's already upstairs)
10. A pair of bookshelf speakers. A pair of normal-sized stereo speakers that I won't have room for until/unless I rearrange the office -- they've got one speaker cone and two painted black circles behind the grille cloth to make them look more expensive. A pair of computer speakers.
11. A Windows 95 machine with a working sound card. And a Windows NT machine that doesn't recognize its sound card (which was brand new when I installed it, but the installation program can't find it).
12. A boom box with a broken tape deck in it but a sometimes sort of working radio section, with a mini headphone output.
13. A handful of cables and adaptors, mostly the wrong cables and too few of the right adaptors.
14. An empty bank account and an empty wallet, so I'm mostly stuck with what I've already got in the house.
15. Guitars, stomp boxes, and microphones.

Most of the things you'd expect to have phono ("RCA") connectors do. Most of the things you'd expect to have phone (quarter inch) connectors do. There are a a few mini phone (eighth inch) connectors, mostly stereo, and mostly in the expected places (such as on the back of the sound card), and stereo phone (quarter inch) jacks (headphone jacks on the CD player and the mixer). Each channel of the mixer has an XLR microphone jack and a phone jack.

Now the trick is to get as many inputs as possible hooked up in ways that let me send their signals where I want them to go before I run out of inputs, cables, or adaptors (the big limting factor at the moment is adaptors, mostly phono->phone ("RCA->quarter-inch") ones. Ideally, I want to set it up so that using it is completely intuitive and I can forget exactly how things are wired: the signals should just Go Where I Want Them without having to throw more switches than would ordinarily be obvious, or disconnect and reconnect things. I want to be able to send pretty much anything to the tape deck, the sound card, or the stereo amplifier at will, and to control the listening/recording volume of any signal from the mixer. And I want to be able to plug in an instrument and/or a microphone (possibly routing them through the multi-effects unit) and send those to the tape deck or the sound card. And I have to watch out for details like the tape deck not copying its input to its output unless the record button is pressed (which complicates the idea of daisy-chaining that and the amplifier on the tape in/out from the mixer), or feedback loops (which could be a problem if the tape deck didn't break the loop).

(The trick after that will be to find sound recording/mixing software that'll run under Win95 on a 120MHz Pentium without much RAM, or to move a Linux box up here from the server room the living room and find sound software that'll work on that (also underpowered).)

The only real time constraint is that I should get it done while I'm still feeling well enough to do the more important stuff on my to-do list. I've got the CD player coming out through the wee speakers, so I'm no longer tuneless.