After moving in the bare bones gear to have a working studio, I found that I wanted to get myself a console to put my display and rack my gear. I was just using a table for the monitor and road racks for the gear.

First couple sessions were basically a jazz band consisting of drums, keys, upright bass, saxophone and trumpet. This allowed me to make sure all monitoring was working and I was limited to the 18 or so channels I had coming through to the control room via the drum snake and a patch panel in the other room.

Second, we shot a video with audio to sync up afterward for a web series. Brian Bortnick was the first of these two.

Third was LauraLea Taraskus for the same web video series.

Since the table didn’t have much girth, if it were bumped substantially the display would rock and all that were around thought the worst. So, I started looking into getting a proper work station to place the display and rack the pre-amps, etc.

I was pretty dead set on an Argosy Halo. What really did bother me was how the display blocked the main view out into the live room.

At that same time, the Slate Media Technology RAVEN MTi CORE Station with 2 RAVEN MTi2s went on sale and I figured for the same price I was considering for the Argosy, I would get a workstation plus 2 Raven MTi2s as well! I did have to consider that I was also dropping from 4K back down to 2x HD.

So I went for it and also picked up the Corestation sidecars to rack the gear.

Breaking all the gear down and wiring it up again was such a joy!

I got a bigger piece of wood to mount the existing Hi-Z and speaker connection that were on the previous panel and added my 32 channel snake so now all 32 channels are coming into the control room. I also found channels that were thought to be unavailable inside the control room wall, so score there!

Now I have an unobstructed view with the artist and a really nice recording system in the control room to pilot the studio that’s nice, neat and looks really great too.

The only complaint really is that the top of the core station is too small to sit my speakers. I had to purchase a taller set of speaker stands to support the rear of the speakers behind the console.

The first couple sessions through this setup proved incredible to me. Utilizing the new preamps etc., the raw recordings have never sounded so good!