

More than that on either piece of hardware, however, and you start looking into either much larger desks, or speaker stands for your monitors. If you have smaller 5″ or 6″ studio monitors, it’s not the end of the world to put them and a single 23″ to 27″ all on the same surface. Well, not only do you have to think about the top shelf room for the display(s), but also for your studio monitors. What’s your current computer monitor setup for your studio desk? Single widescreen display? Dual widescreens? Planning on being a baller and upgrading to a nice big ultrawide (or two)? Your display setup will definitely impact what studio furniture options you have available. If you think you’ll be getting serious about at least one signal chain, it’s worth planning ahead and getting some rack space.
Sound studio desk Patch#
While many people are skipping expensive outboard equipment in favor of mixing “in the box”, there’s still some critical hardware you’ll end up with as you progress, like the power conditioner, larger audio interfaces, patch bays, and usually at least a mic pre and compressor. Having that built into the desk is what really helps justify the price tag for a purpose-built home studio desk. Having the gear in rack spaces is nice, keeps it out of the way, hides your cable clutter, and generally keeps things in order. Personally, while I don’t have anything rack-mounted other than a power conditioner, I do plan on upgrading to a larger interface, and perhaps a nice mic pre or two. Usually, 8U is plenty of total space for the home recording engineer, and if you need more, there are add-on options.

Power conditioners and smaller equipment are 1U, whereas a lot of pre-amps are 2U, or twice as tall. So look at your current recording gear to determine how much space you need, along with what gear you plan on buying in the future.Ī quick note: A rack “U” is one unit of vertical height in your rack. A majority of studio desks above 45″ is usually the presence of 8U of rack space, usually divided up into two 4U rack bays. The main difference between a good home studio desk and a regular desk is the rack space. I’m not terribly demanding here, but many do need to have their controllers right in front of them. But I do want to add a second set of monitors eventually and with that some sort of monitor control box. Personally, I don’t have plans to add a keyboard or other sort of instrument controller, as I pretty much never use one. Others just need their keyboard, mouse, and that’s it.
Sound studio desk full#
Keyboard, faders, button strip, full control surface, etc. What’s on the work surface? What can go, what needs to stay, and what do you wish you had there? Some people want room for a MIDI controller.
Sound studio desk upgrade#
But depending on your current gear, your planned upgrade path, and your room situation will dictate most of what you’ll be looking for in a desk for your studio. What to look for in a great home recording studio desk?Ī good home studio desk needs to do a few things well, and thankfully it’s not much. 3.1 On-Stage Stands WS7500 Wood Workstation.2.6 Ultimate Support Nucleus-Z Explorer Studio Desk.2.1 Acme Furniture Eleazar Music Recording Studio Desk.1.6 A comfortable office or computer chair.1.4 Studio desk cable management and computer placement.1.2 Rack space for your outboard equipment.1 What to look for in a great home recording studio desk?.We also plan on putting together an article about using non-specialized desks as a recording desk, and that will come soon enough. Yes, that’s still pretty expensive for a studio desk, but for studio furniture, it’s pretty reasonable. We’re also looking at keeping the price ceiling at around $1000. Our search was focused more on budget-friendly solutions, as well as home and bedroom studio situations.įor that reason, we’re omitting some of the bigger and more expensive studio desks like the ultra-popular Argosy, Omnirax, AZ-Studio Workstations, and the like. After doing a good amount of research on building our own music workstation, we figured that other people would benefit from this as well. This very topic of home studio furniture is actually one of the reasons we started this site. But that’s not to say that it’s an impossible task, as there are some absolutely great budget home recording studio desks out there. After finding a bunch of crazy expensive options (along with some less expensive ones), we realized that there are not many desks for studios for most of us to choose from. We’ve finally been getting around to setting up our spare room as my home studio and wanted to look into a new recording studio desk.
