Any love for rackmount!?

[JTurbide]

Don't know if there is a thread on that already but anyone else here into racks?

I'm new to all this myself but I now have a little 4U rack with:
Carvin DCM150, SMS CTP (twin reverb tube preamp) and a Quadraverb (incoming).

I either will fill it up with another fx unit or I might go with some kind of rackmounted synth module and go with a built-in MIDI shit on my custom guitar I have on order.

Will likely get a bigger or another small rack. I guess at some point you have to get a mixer and maybe some switch thingy but not really sure how that works and why you need them yet.

So... Any love for rackmount? Any tips or ideas? Great cheap gear to find?

[jirodreamsofdank]

I started picking up rack gear when it got listed locally cheap before the pandemic and prices climbed - got a Midiverb 2, a Quadraverb 1 and 2, a Roland SDE-1000 (12 bit delay - sounds great if you make it 100% wet with no delay just as a 12 bit crunch machine), Ibanez HD-1500 (delay, pitch shifter).

The Roland and Ibanez are my favorites, the reverbs are good but reverb plugins are too easy (and Valhalla Supermassive can sound real close to the Alesis 'verbs).

The one I have to wait on until Christmas is an Eventide H3000 - it was local to him for a ridiculously low price so I got him to grab it, he's going to drive it here in person when he comes for the holidays instead of trusting his amateur packing skills.

I've got my eye on a Korg SDD-1200 dual delay on EBay but they've climbed to $300 and I don't know why I wouldn't just get a Strymon Dig or Meris Polymoon there.

[Gone Fission]

Cheap good rack stuff has kind of disappeared during the pandemic. A couple years ago I got a Lexicon MPX1 for under $100, and these day people are asking $250 or more. H3000 prices have shot up to the point you can usually get an Orville for less. (Mind you, the H3000 still has some unique tricks, so newer and insanely more powerful isn’t the whole story.)

I’m just not seeing anything really bargain-y in old rack stuff right now. Maybe Aphex gates and compressors haven’t climbed past the normal pre-pandemic range with a few high asking prices, but I haven’t been watching. Get one of the gates with sidechain input fed by a drum machine and it’s one of the most interesting line-level tremolo processors you can devise.

[JTurbide]

Yeah the H3000 looks great but for about 3k... Nope.
I am excited to try my quadraverb once it arrives. I'd also like to get a good chorus but idk what (if anything) a rackmounted one would add vs a pedal one.

Any of you uses mixers or switchers? I wonder at what point they are needed and exactly why? The first probably most obvious use for a switcher (I think) would be to switch between different preamps or power amps, right? Mixers would be most useful for fx? For example if you have 3 fx unit you could put them on 3 different send/return and mix how much of each you get on your signal... While if you go straight through your 3 units you would have to mess with each of their mix knob (if they have one) or mix setting in menus,.. am I right?

Trying to understand as much as possible to plan ahead

[qersty]

There is a huge rack thread. Mixers are useful cause you can run time based stuff in parallel so it dont degrade you signal. I chickened out on that though because i couldnt find a small mixer with tons of sends except for this rare old shure unit. mixers for preamps can be cool too. Lou reeds 90s rig ran 5 soldano pres in parallel.

There are a few rack chorus units that are cool; Roland Dimension, TriChorus, the one im interested in it the TC 1210. There is also stuff like the Marshall Time Modulator hich does chorus and flange. In the rack world choruses arent really a thing, you use modulated delays (or detune; or both) for that. Rack is a lot more "professional" than pedals and you are expected to make modulation effects and stuff yourself. I pedsonally ditched building racks cause i realized the thing with pedals are how easy they are to pull out and plug in and tidy away

[rfurtkamp]

About the only thing I still buy, even though I have most of my mission critical rack toys. This is the golden age of reissues - a SDD-320 that sounds good for under $200? Take me, big boi. Under 4 figure Pultec EQP clones, and you have a choice of varieties? Ravage me now!

In the under-rated and unappreciated, as always, my big three:

Boss GL-100 "Guitar Driver" - basically every analog era Boss pedal in a rackmount with a gloriously efficient dual para EQ on the main channel, and a damn good one on the second. I run two for stereo! Several folks here have gotten them after I gushed about them for years.

Lexicon Vortex. The unit that bankrupted Lexicon in the 90s is still dirt cheap. It's the inspiration, uncredited, for today's "weird" digital pedal effects - only better. Algos I still can't describe, writ large and ugly and weird. It also was the first unit to allow for "morphing" - where you have an A and B preset (which can be entirely different algos), and get a gradient between them that combines them on an expression pedal. I'm partial to running the LFO expression control on my Boss ES-8 into it and just autosweeping on a patch-by-patch basis. If you ain't got the Bleen, you have have no soul.

Digitech RDS series (900/1900/3600[3.6), 8000). I'm partial to the 1900 and 3.6s/3600s for cost, as the "Time Machine" 8000s always cost WAAAY too much. Imagine taking a chorus algo and extending it out to 4 seconds of delay. Rubber band city. Has sample and hold as well, CV control, and the LFO for warp fun (as well as the sample and hold buffer) are post-delay line, meaning you can non-destructively fuck with the held item in the delay line and return it to where it was in pitch and LFO wave. Hands on fun in a rack. I used to get them from Guitar Center used piles on tour by telling them they were broken for $50 or so when you couldn't touch a delay for $200 or less of ANY type, and usually walked out with it snickering.

Honorable mention: Alesis Quadraverb. Spend the $20 to get the Quadraverb+ eprom upgrade and a modern LCD screen for readability and change the battery while you're in there. Almost unparalled control over the multi-tap delay - stereo spread, individual tap feedback. Dirt cheap and efficient monster that you can do unholy things with.

Art SGE Mach II: cheap, shitty, but it *WILL* get you 90s industrial in a box for pennies. The digital dirt is AWFUL in the best way. If you see one with a scrambled LCD, the battery needs to be changed realistically, negotiate it as "broken", profit.

My go to rack, the Klark-Teknik 3rd dimension ives in the mixer/digital recorder chain out in the practice space fulltime (and I have a Boss DC-2W in the patchbay in SDD-320 mode for that purpose already)

[JTurbide]

Nice!!

The 3rd dimension looks great, would have been even better if it was only 1U. They wanted that real thing look.
Excited to mess with the Quadraverb

[jirodreamsofdank]

I forgot non-vintage stuff - I got the Behringer 1176 and SDD-320 clones when Alto was running a sale but I've only used them a little.

[qersty]

Art SGE Mach II: cheap, shitty, but it *WILL* get you 90s industrial in a box for pennies. The digital dirt is AWFUL in the best way. If you see one with a scrambled LCD, the battery needs to be changed realistically, negotiate it as "broken", profit.]

they also have the best aesthetics of any piece of gear

[crochambeau]

I spent years compulsively being a rack gear hoarder, I'm somewhat better now but it's still my favourite format.

There is a huge rack thread. Mixers are useful cause you can run time based stuff in parallel so it dont degrade you signal. I chickened out on that though because i couldnt find a small mixer with tons of sends except for this rare old shure unit.

Was it one of these?



If so, you did yourself a favour unless you really like harsh noise. I have concluded that most telephony/teleconferencing gear is not concerned with fidelity - just legibility. Entirely different things, hahaha.

Anyway, it's been a while since I've strafed a thread with gear porn, here are a select few:



The Grass S4 stimulators are tubed pulse generators built for medical and research fields. The wave-forms are not nearly as crisp as something from the electronics test/aeronautics/military realm, and in my opinion this is a huge strength. I think I've had to "go inside" each of these, so they're a bit demanding. I have no idea what these command in post-Hainbach days.



Rack synths and a sampler, inboard of a rack mixer (Hill Multimix). It looks like I forgot to picture the MIDI process rack (a MIDI patch bay, a couple pitch to MIDI processors, and a couple old Akai MIDI delay units) but you can use your imagination.



Some effects. As can be inferred, I like the old Digitech DSP stuff - nice and dark somewhat grainy lofi. I pretty much only use the ultimate reverb algorithm, but with real time MIDI parameter control the other algorithms can be playful. Eventide speaks for itself, one of my luckiest gear scores (I tend to buy broken and fix, so, earned? hahaha). The real reason I'm sharing this pic is the Akai MB76, which is a 7 input 6 output stepped matrix mixer with 32 memory slots and MIDI patch control. By stepped I mean there are something like 14 levels from none to full on, so it's a bit rudimentary but what can you expect from the mid 1980s. Uses a mid 1980s IC designed for use in programmable graphic equalizers (and sounds like it, if 1980s stereo systems have a "sound" for you). Not ultra hifi, but super handy.



Then I started buying shit like this (and old analog video gear, another totally fucked rabbit hole), sometimes spending well over a hundred bucks in shipping something I paid around ten on. This thing makes a super narrow pulse at rather high amplitude to do shit like drive radar. Guess how cool a super narrow pulse is for sonic creation? It's not. LP pop is better. I bought TWO of those fucking things with their hydrogen filled Thyratron output tubes. That was the beginning of the end. Be warned that this way harbours beasts.

Have fun though, seriously, 19 inch rack is a fantastic format.

[qersty]

No it was a music audio thing called "auxpander". it has pretty impressive specs

[JTurbide]

Geeez!

Question for you guys! (Just to make sure I don't blow anything up)

I just ordered a Sansamp PSA-1 so I now have two preamps and a Carvin DCM150 power amp. I already did that with the fx return of my interblock as a power amp but now that I have this 2 channel power amp I just want to make sure what I'm doing is ok.

I think I have two options here, please correct me if one is wrong or if one is better than the other. Keep in mind I have only one 8 ohm cab. I'll also have the quadraverb just before the power amp in each case (I think? Or is it better before the pre?).

Option 1:
I could send my guitar to a radial ABY and then choose which preamp receive the signal. Then have each preamp on a different channel of the carvin and have the carvin in parrallel (not sure if I would have to be on bridged or unbridged mode). So each power amp channel always sees the its preamp but the guitar only goes to a single preamp at a time. Would that work? Would sending the signal to both preamp simultaneously blow things up?

Option 2:
Have my guitar going into both preamp at all time (would that damage them?) and put a switcher after the preamps. So I choose which preamp signal comes out of the switcher and goes through the carvin (which would be in bridged mode (parrallel mode off).

[rfurtkamp]

Both preamps, you can split until the cows come home.

Don't connect power amp out to anything but speaker cabs.

I have my usual guitar runnihg through several preamps (including one master channel EQ) that splits to amps, rackmount pres, etc as I want.

[JTurbide]

Thanks! Yeah thinking about it I don't think option one would work because I only have one cab so I need the dcm bridged. I'll send both preamps into a radial i/o and have only one of them going to the power amp (the other one running through nothing) at a time. My only worry was about preamps being able to be powered on and receive a signal while not bein connected to a power amp

[rfurtkamp]

They don't care about not sending anything anywhere.

Effectively a pedal is a "preamp" - you can run it with no cable connection for eternity, with no harm in excess of what happens if you were to use it for that many hours!