Snap, crackle and pop.

Bit of a manic few days here at GCHQ, after leaving the window open over night last week (in whilst it was raining of course) our faithful mackie mixer (32 line input rack mounted jobbie) developed a very noticeable amount of noise on both the outputs to the monitors and on the headphone socket.

Things got so bad over the next couple of days we had to revert to our back up smaller mackie to finish off the sample work we were in the middle of producing. Not ideal.

Limped to the end of the job (top tip here - always, always have a back up system) and stripped the mixer from the rack. After taking some advise we took the back off and gave the mixer a full 15 mins with a hair dryer to make sure there was no moisture inside. After letting it cool we tried it again and touch wood snap, crackle and pop has gone - phew!

Although we're using a temporary home for the studio at the moment (hence the curtains in the pic below ;) we thought it might be an idea to strip down everything in our 2 main racks, sell of some gear we don't really use and re-wire everything back up again. horrible job but one that needs doing every now and then, the mixer had to be reconnected in to the rack anyway so....

After a few long hours sweating and swearing, connecting and cable tying, testing and reconnecting the right way around, our 2 racks and mixer are back in business. Neater, cleaner and stripped of anything we really don't use enough.

In more gear porn related news, we've had a couple of tasty bits of gear drop into our grubby hands - more on that later this week with some pics and hopefully some samples.