Things are going very good but alot of testing involved for a thing of this magnitude. Are features are completely functional but I'm making some minor improvements/adjustments. I believe I'm done tweaking the power supply at this point. Noise levels from 5Hz to 50KHz are at -130db on an RMAA scale. Not too shabby. Too be honest the power supply is overkill at this point, but NOBODY will have noise/power issues. The grounding scheme is very simple, just a simple wire from the power supply to the star ground, pin 1 of the inputs/output XLR's to star ground, and IEC ground to star ground as well of course. Adding CRC to the Power Supply Inputs does absolutely nothing to decrease noise floor at this point, I think I've crossed the threshold of how quiet you can get this thing. I've got THD readings of .002%. Going to do some adjustments in the audio section and increase L/R isolation a bit. I'm getting about 10db more R>L crosstalk than L>R at 20KHz. Crosstalk levels below 10KHz are down around -90db or so. That being said, highest R>L crosstalk point is -65db at 20KHZ (still acceptable), but I'm annoyed by this more than anything so going to try to get that down to at least the -80db area. I have a good idea where the culprit is, so going to do some trace cutting and jumpering to confirm this. Bargraph is working great and looks awesome. It's definiately the icing on the cake and really glad I incorporated it.
If you want to do your own faceplate you're more than welcome to, but a word of caution, if you want to use all of the features, you're going to pretty much need stick to the layout I've got, there's not really any other way to cram everything in there otherwise. Also, if you're planning to use the bargraph, have you panel professionally made. It mounts to the rear of the front panel, and is visable through a rectangle cutout, but there's no front bezel, so if you try to hog out the bargraph cutout yourself, it will look like crap, trust me. If you don't want to use the bargraph, like I had previously mentioned, just break it off - but to be honest I don't know why you wouldn't want it, it's an awesome feature. That all being said, I'll be showing my final frontpanel design in about a week or so, I'm VERY happy with it. It looks totally like anything else you'd go into the store and buy, which was what I was aiming for. I also decided to not put the name Shadowbuss on the front but rather a model, was thinking something like SB4000 or something along those lines. Ties it in with the original, and you'll all know what the SB stands for, but makes it sound a little more professional and will look good in the studio.
Because of the additional tweaking I'm doing, it's mandatory for me to do one more round of Prototyping before I pull the trigger on production boards. Even though it's just minor tweaking, I don't want to roll the dice on something like this without having built the absolute final version myself first. Will have my next prototype round in a couple weeks. All in all thanks for all of the support and patience guys, I can honestly say the wait will be worth it, this was an incredibally easy & fun build. I'll post some new pics of the finished unit later today.
