racking tube gear in console

[morls]

Hi,
I'm looking into building a console for my studio, something like this:



What's got me scratching my head a bit is, how does tube gear dissipate heat when racked like this? There are plenty of pics showing mastering consoles with this layout, but I'm wondering how others install gear like pultecs, massive passives and tube compressors vertically without encountering heat issues?

Cheers
Stephen

 

[gyraf]

Depends on how much heat you need to dissipate - tube stuff does not necessarily get all that hot

E.g. my G14 passive EQ and my G22 dual vari-mu consume (= dissipates) something like 25-30W of power each

Only things I'd mount extra-ventilated would be computers, power amps and -supplies - and K&H UE-100's

/Jakob E.

 

[ruffrecords]

Tubes get an undeserved bad press when it comes to heat generation. This probably stems form guitar amps which have big tubes in them generating lots of heat. But when it comes to line level signals much smaller tubes operating at a few mA are the norm and they generate much less heat. Most of them will generate 25W or less heat which means normal convection cooling that would be part of any good rack layout should suffice.

Cheers

Ian

 

[TwentyTrees]

Thanks Ian and Jakob, and thanks Stephen for asking the question - I'm waiting on delivery of a custom desk and am tinkering with the layout right now, so this is really helpful.

 

[soapfoot]

Anything with a big power amp (e.g. dual 6V6) and a larger tube rectifier (like a 5U4GB, 5Y3, etc) is likely to generate a fair amount of heat. Some of the old broadcast gear like the Sta-Level, SA-39b, Collins 26U, BA6A, etc would fall into this category.

But as-mentioned, something like an LA-2A (which has only small dual triodes and a single 6AQ5, with silicon rectifiers) will be another matter, and should be quite manageable.

 

[morls]

Thanks everyone, this is a great help.
Stephen