The Hardware Megathread

[relic]

sweet, the USPS is delivering my crusty old mixer a day early. Godless Fedex basically never does that (tbh they are my least favorite shipping company), because they are not god-fearing and righteous like the godly USPS who regularly delivers early (I’m being facetious here… sorry in advance if I offend anyone). Fedex is late sometimes.

I can’t wait to tear into it tomorrow It’ll be a welcome change from this f’ing sampler I have no idea what to do with…

I don’t mind FedEx. They are the most expensive but they’ve never lost anything of mine or had it sitting at a sorting center for months meanwhile everyone just shrugs their shoulders and acts dumb when I call around for help (looking at you US Postal Service). In the USPS defense though, we have a notoriously bad, regional sorting center somewhere just on the other side of our border with Pennsylvania. I think it has a 2 star rating on Google. Claims of workers just straight up stealing packages and such lol.

I could be wrong, but I think they are slow/late with home delivery because they prioritize businesses. When I worked at the motorcycle leather shop we had to fight with the local FedEx depot because they would try to deliver things 3-4 hours before we opened and then we’d have to cancel the delivery, wait a day and send someone down to the depot to pick it up. They were just trying to do their job and get us stuff fast but we were a small business and didn’t have a 3rd shift person for taking deliveries and stocking.

UPS is the only one I’ve not had any unusual experiences with.

[Koldunya]

Well, this old BX-60 works fine. It does have one oddity which is unfortunate, I don’t know if it’s a defect/malfunction or just a quirk of how it is. If I push the S2400 into it too much, it acts like an automagical sidechain on the other signals coming into it Notes/sounds on the kick get silenced out, so like, a droning oscillator sounds like it’s playing quarter notes on the beat. It does do nice things to the drums, though, so I might just run 6 of the S2400s outputs into it and the stereo out to the H4 and call it done for now. I plan to get a little rack shelf to put assorted smol pieces of gear on, so the BX-60 will probably live on that with some guitar pedals, so eventually plumb it into the patch bay or something.

It does ensure the kick isn’t drowned out by that thicc MiniBrute 2S bass, though, which is nice to have.

As I play with this setup, some things just get wonky. Sometimes the 2S and S2400 are just not happy communicating with each other. I’ve had weird sequencer oddities with both machines and had to restart either one of them to clear it up. Not sure yet which machine to blame; I need to take one and then the other out of the picture and see if problems come back; I’m leaning to the S2400 as it’s a less mature product, and I’ve had both the Pulse 2 and Wasp freak out after getting MIDI notes from it (stuck on notes, I guess I figured out how to get the Pulse 2 to drone lol.) The Wasp doesn’t have a panic button and so I have to power the entire RackBrute off to sort it out.

I think I’ll give the Maschine+ a go at it and if it works, post issues on the Isla forum. I think most people there use the S2400 by itself, though. Maybe I’m asking too much of a modernized SP-1200 recreation

I think for $8 I made out like a bandit on this mixer, though. It’s definitely worth cleaning up, now. I noticed most of the “knobs” are trimpots like those used on densely packed eurorack modules and some smaller gear like the Volcas and MFB 522, but nothing is scratchy atm. I think this thing got used for a while and then sat for a very long time.

[relic]

I wonder if there is some kind of internal limiter (ie; passive, you have no control over it) in the BX-60?

[Koldunya]

Kinda what I’m thinking. If I turn the drums down it stops happening, and I can see some little lights that remind me of the limiter light on an old bass amp with that built into it. And also, lol, I forgot to mention it came packed in some old dirty furniture foam

[relic]

I mean, I’m all for recycling/reusing but that’s a new one…lol

[Koldunya]

I’m not kidding lol

[White_Noise]

One of the lesser perks of California is that I live within half an hour of 3 airports and 2 ginormalous ports, so I get pretty much everything I order ahead of schedule. It basically comes off the boat/plane and they drop it on a truck and get it to me often that same day. I also live like 35 minutes from the City of Industry, which is a huge warehouse city that has a population of about 50 or something. It’s ALL warehouses. So a lot of the stuff I order is already just sitting there somewhere.

[relic]

That is hilarious. I guess who cares as long as the the thing shows up and nothing is gross or smells lol

[Koldunya]

Not gonna lie… Maschine+ is a ton more useful in this little permanent setup I have going than the S2400 I can lay down drums with a quickness with the S2400, but the Maschine kills it in controlling everything else. I think I may just use the S2400 by itself which tends to be how most people use it anyway. Keep things simple with it, since that’s essentially what it’s meant for and how it seems to perform best.

Whatever am I going to do with all this room on my desk I just cleared up by moving the Maschine…

That is hilarious. I guess who cares as long as the the thing shows up and nothing is gross or smells lol

I definitely washed my hands afterward XD

[Koldunya]

This might interest some of you. A Maschine+ for $900

https://reverb.com/item/46602490-native-instruments-maschine-plus

In other news, this BX-60 cleaned up very well. There is… something that slides around inside the case, and I don’t feel like opening it to find out what XD

Edit 2 Damn it, the laptop stands I like to use for gear are “currently unavailable” and Amazon suggests a product whose picture looks identical but is twice the cost

[Koldunya]

I put the stock knobs back on my Maschine+ and put the big one on the Proteus 2000. That looks fucking fantastic

Edit The Morpheus, on the other hand, has a 6mm volume pot, and the data encoder is 6.35mm/0.25" which is a lot harder to find these days. I have some knobs that fit, but their height just doesn’t look right, like on the Maschine…

[st3aLth]

Saw a monkey on a synthesizer

[RFJ]

I’m looking for an end of chain device, besides the Analog Heat, that can go at the end of a synth / pedal setup to amp the signal to headphones, with stereo I/O. I was looking at the Strymon iridium but unsure because it’s definitely geared to guitars as an amp sim. It does check boxes however with the eq, stereo I/O and headphone out.

Why someone doesn’t make an end of chain device for a small setup like this besides the analog heat is beyond me. Seems there would be a huge market for this.

Problem with the iridium is once I buy the iridium I’ll need something to record the signal. At that point I might as well just buy a heat, lol. It would be my 3rd or maybe even 4th one I’ve owned. I love the heat but was looking for something small and more cost effective.

I even considered a 2x2 interface that can run stand alone or just running direct to a zoom h5 or something like that.

There’s no going back from the rabbit hole I’m currently in, lol. Suggestion box is open if anyone has one.

[Koldunya]

Handy friend has a drill press. So I’m going to line one of these aluminum controls up with a 6mm bit and then drill it out to 6.35mm.

The Wasp Deluxe, like the original, does this annoying thing of “lol 37 notes ONLY LOL!” and so using the Maschine+ in Keyboard Mode, some notes cut off at the upper end of the pads

Suggestion box is open if anyone has one.

Well, I have a Zoom H6 that everything goes into; it has a headphone out, and an aux out that goes to my bass amp. Neunaber makes a product called the Iconoclast with stereo inputs and outputs, headphones, too.

https://neunaber.net/collections/pedals/products/iconoclast

More or less half the price of the Strymon and imo Neunaber makes great things (I have an older Wet stereo reverb and love it). Instead of using IRs, you have an active simulator with knobs so maybe it’s better with synths?

[RFJ]

I had not seen the iconoclast. Solid suggestion, ticks the boxes. I agree neunaber makes solid products. The stereo wet is always something I’ve had an eye on when looking at pedals.

I’m not pulling the trigger right away so if anyone has any other thoughts I’ll take them.

[Koldunya]

I plugged my SRC6 (Ibanez) bass into the B7K bass preamp pedal and then into the BX-60

The active electronics in the bass are enough to overdrive the piss out of that mixer unless I put the input gain all the way to the line side, and with a bit of bass boost I can still get it to saturate if I dig in with a pick It was kind of neat to have something that responds like that. I’ll probably bypass it and plug straight into the H6 or Maschine+

This $25 “CoolMusic Insane” distortion is pretty damned nice o.O It sounds a lot better on synths than my B7K that I had high hopes for. It was cheap and cheerful and just does the job well. I might have to pick up another since they’re practically given away used and they’re pretty smol… The B7K was nice for an EQ boost, the K-2 was vibrating the wall (and from two 4.5" speakers lol Phil Jones amps are little and awesome).

Wiring is such a pain and I never have the right lengths I need… I should just buy a bunch of plug connectors and a spool of cable.

[Koldunya]

They were responding to my jam station pic with the monkey perched on it. As for the video itself I have no idea myself XD

[Koldunya]

I’m not talking to my Minibrute 2S right now…

The Wasp can fuck right off, too, for that matter lol…

K-2 is being my homie though (apparently I can’t get this pic to display right… but it’s both pitch knobs dead at 12 o’clock XD )

[Koldunya]

…now my Maschine+ is being pissy about loading from one of the fastest SD cards, and their articles even mention using the Sandisk Extreme Pros as advantageous.

…meanwhile my Plus chokes and stumbles and then crashes/reloads spontaneously. It’s about half full. I need to purge some of these Kontakt libraries I never use.

Got a cool song going, though (But I still despise NI’s asinine user content way of only two folders deep…)

[Koldunya]

I think I got a knockoff SD card It maxes out at 84MB/s when it’s a 170MB/s card, and the volume creation date is listed as December 31, 1969, and modified on January 1, 1980 o.O (Apparently several SD cards I have laying around show that…)

I plugged in a Samsung USB flash drive that destroys it @ 107MB/s write and 355-392MB/s read. Welp.

I have a PNY “95MB/s” SD card that’s doing about as well as the previous Sandisk (it’s absolute trash at write speeds, though, 8MB/s )

Lexar “633X speed” did 20-40MB/s write and about as well as the Sandisk on reads. Well, 65-70MB/s+…

I should really go to bed…