DIY Console at Durham Sound Studios

[Tubetec]

I had a chance to do a tour of one of the larger London studios about 20 years back , the techs said there was hardly a week went by where they didnt have to pull channels from the VR consoles and repair them , it was a never ending battle .

 

[ruffrecords]

Sure, go to line stages with 6V6's or similar, a console gets hot, but it's only those stages doing it. My RCA BC-2B gets warm over time because of the three 6V6's, and there's a lot of airspace in there. The other tubes can be touched to remove from the sockets immediately after powering down. When my control room had 8 channels of tube limiters and line amps with sixteen 6V6's, they'd heat the room. These days I turn on many more preamp channels without power tubes and it's not noticeable.

The Neve VR that was close by is the hottest console I've ever been on, you could feel the heat rising 6 inches above the surface. My MOTU converters and my Dolby 740 run hotter than most of my tube gear.

You are dead right about the Neve VR. An ex-Neve friend of mine was head of mechanical design for that project and his biggest headache was getting all the heat out.

Cheers

Ian

 

[pvision]

And they still do. Some models of the SSL4000 series consume more than 3KW.

But less than half of that is dissipated by the console. The rest is dissipated by the psu & computer rack that should be in another room