jimmyjazz wrote on Wed, 01 November 2006 10:31 |
How did you score a free console?
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*THE STORY*
A pretty high buck film and audio post house (CineSound 2) in town closed when the owner died unexpectedly in August. They had a bunch of AMS/Neve Audio File systems that they were going to either give away or throw away, so we figured we'd better go down and look. We were searching for manuals and such in a storage room and on a shelf I noticed a green three-ring binder that said "Quad 8 Console" on the side. I said, "oh, he had a Quad 8? That's cool." "Oh, we still have that!"
"WHAT?!? WHERE?"
"It's in storage in another office in this complex...I don't have the key, but I'll get it on friday...I was just going to get rid of it..."
I damn near shit my pants saying "NO DON'T WE'LL TAKE IT OFF YOUR HANDS!!!"
We chatted for a bit and set things up to pick it up on Friday. Well...the guy with the keys didn't show on Friday, so we had to wait over the weekend...I was tense, to say the least. I didn't want this thing walking away from me...it was WAY too rare a score to see go away...so we sat on our hands over the weekend. I headed down to Minneapolis for class Monday morning only to get stuck in traffic because of 3 accidents. What is a 20-25 minute drive in clear conditions (and a half hour to 40 during rush) took an hour and ten minutes. Needless to say I skipped out and went home...I ditched my second class of the afternoon as well. I got home right about 9 a.m. and called our gal at the studio.."Yep...it's out of storage...come on down and pick it up!!" So my buddy Andrew grabbed his dad's F-350 and we trucked it down there (pun completely intended) and spent a good hour wrestling that SOB into the back of the truck. YAHOOO!!!
This is a Quad Eight film dubbing console. All the MM310 Mix Channels are line level only. No mic preamps. I forgot to grab the docs when I came downstairs, and frankly, I'm about to fall asleep in the keyboard, so I'll post the model # info tomorrow.
Another most excellent thing is that this console's former owner was a complete gearhead. He has original blueprints for the console, and schematics for every component in the damn thing, not to mention the Q8 sales brochure from that year, cut sheets on 3 different consoles...schematics of those consoles...price lists, notes of wiring modifications...basically enough documentation to build this thing from scratch. No joke. It was built in 76 and decommissioned in 1990, when it seems as though it was cannibalized a little bit. It was SUPPOSED to have 2 712 graphic EQ's (think API 560) and 2 227 Mic preamps, as well as a CA2 compressor, all of which are notably missing. HOWEVER, the Kepex and the Gain-Brain don't appear anywhere in his docs, and are pretty frickin' cool things to find on the board.
I'm really excited to dig into this project, as it also looks like we'll have a facility outside the house by next summer or fall. Hopefully I can figure out how to make this thing functional...as there are some definite challenges. Namely that as far as I can tell, this board has a mono master section. anyone else notice the alarming lack of pan knobs? Took me 3 hours to figure that out. Plus the console frame straight up sucks. So...it basically needs a new summing/master section and pan pots on all the channels. That may mean a new buss assignment section (which I'm okay with, so long as I get to keep the echo sends). I'd also like to dig up 4 more mm310 strips so I could have a legit 16x2 summing mixer (with 16 channels of passive, inductor-based EQ), and 2 aux busses (that I'd really like to put a spring reverb and tape delay in). The frame will be rebuilt, with a few minor ergonomic changes and a space for a keyboard, mouse, and display. I'd like to add some stuff to that upper channel that houses the master secion and the Gain-Brain and Kepex (like a couple 3 more gain-brains and a couple Kepexes)...maybe convert a small section of it to 500-series size and put a few 500 size modules up there. there's an 11-U 19" rack to the left of the channels, and there's ample room for another on the right. If I can lose the logic section, I can make room for another 19" rack on the right, and have all my preamps and outboard 19" stuff (or at least most of it) on the desktop, which would be pretty frickin' cool.
I had a chat with Dan Kennedy yesterday, and he said he'd be willing to come up and help out with some stuff. It's looking like I'm going to start a "Re-Building The Console" thread at StudioForums. I'll be sure to post a link and let y'all know what's going on once I get the ball rolling!