studioporn

i'm on the verge of whoring myself out in order to pay for the mounting studio-building costs. it's absolutely amazing how quickly all this stuff adds up.

the latest sticker shock comes from pricing out the wiring for the studio. when you add up the 8-channel snakes, midi cable, connectors, boxes, plates, and various other odds and ends, the total comes to around $1000. granted, this price tag is for mogami cable, which is very high quality--but you pay for what you get. initially i was gonna cut some corners with the wiring, until i realized that much of this wiring is going to be permanent or semi-permanent, so it'd be best if i err on the side of higher quality now and know that i'll still be happy with my choice 3 years from now.

HVAC specifics are still up in the air (more on that in a sec), so to keep costs down for the immediate future i'm just dealing with the cabling that absolutely has to be run before putting up the drywall. which translates to the mic and headphone lines for the iso booths. the headphone connections are all cat5, and i just finished running 2 lines to each iso booth. i have about 120' of 2-channel mogami snake cable on order so i can do 2 mic jacks for each booth. the company i'm ordering from also makes these cool surface-mount modular boxes where you can run cat5, mic, 1/4", midi, RCA, or any other kind of cable imaginable and then get n-hole faceplates and connectors for each of the cabling types specially designed to fit that hole size. this solves my problem of needing wiring panels that both look nice and are easily configurable.

so about HVAC stuff. the ductwork is being installed on the 12th and 13th. i still have no clue yet what to do about the furnace. everything's fine except for the humidity control issue. over the past week when it's been cooler but not cold, i've seen the upstairs humidity get as high as 61%, which is suboptimal. both the HVAC guy and i are having a bitch of a time trying to find a system that can do whole-house dehumidification independent of heating cooling and not cost several thousand dollars.

currently the most promising solutions look to be the lennox humiditrol and the carrier infinity system. both use the a/c evaporator coil to dehumidify. i know the lennox system then has a reheat stage to compensate for the temperature drop across the coil. i'm waiting to hear back as to whether the carrier system has a similar reheat stage.

the only problem with both of these is that the humidity-control components aren't really modular; to use them you have to buy into a full-blown system with all these other bells and whistles, which drives up the cost rather quickly. and for both of these systems i'd have to replace the evaporator coil and condensing unit right away if i want to have whole-house dehumidification between now and spring. that alone adds at least $3500 to the price tag.

if i do the full infinity system now, then the system + ductwork would come to $12k. i suspect the lennox system will come with a simliar price tag. i might just have to get one of these systems without the a/c parts to get me through the winter and then deal with that in the spring. although it's not ideal, i could use my room dehumidifiers to hold me over until then.

fortunately at this point in the process there aren't too many more surprises with high price tags that could jump out at me. or at least so i hope.