Progress update on the Stagetec Nexus
After months of emailing, dealing with a pointless reseller, dropping half as much as I spent on the hardware on a piece of software (begrudgingly) some dude leaving the company resulting in my order falling into a black hole, and a short rant laced with standard issue colorful language, I finally got my hands on the Nexus Configuration Utility. It's a desktop app that basically lets you drag and drop cards around in your existing system and re-arrange them, and tweak some associated features. Once you've got it sorted out you export it and can then upload the resulting config files to the system. It's super locked down, only licensed to configs you own, and tied to a USB drive as a hardware key, so you can't export the final files if that's not connected. Fucking overkill on the lockdown, but whatever. Since they dropped the ball, they sped things up and just linked it to a thumb drive I already had rather than shipping one. So I fucked around with it a bit and managed to successfully reconfigure the layout.
So the third Base Device I got, (the 6RU box on top in the pic) has a newer iteration of their proprietary fiber network card, which unfortunately isn't compatible with the other two, so I mostly emptied that one out, and crammed as much as I could into the other two. It's CPU unit was newer and actually is compatible so I swapped that over too. It has some added features, like a network port for access from the control PC, and Loudness Monitoring.
As before the 9RU box is mostly AES3 digital stuff, I sacrificed one of the gpio cards and added the RJ45 AES3 card (16x16) and 12 Line AD inputs which wouldn't fit in the other box.
The 12RU box has 88 Line AD inputs, and 48 Lin DA outputs and 24 Mic AD inputs which have a nice little feature that basically clones it 4 ways so you can have 4 different gain settings for any given mic. Also, I'm sure I mentioned before, but the Mic cards have no analog pre, they convert A-D at Mic level.
So ultimately I had to sacrifice 4 Line ins, and a gpio card, but I now have a functional system with a total of 152 AES in, 72 AES out, 100 Line in, 48 line out, 24 mic ins, a gpio card, and a serial control card.
Now the fun part. Even with the super locked down software, there's room for hackage. The Software will let you save a config as an xml file to be converted to the system binaries later. The XML file is human readable and can be edited in a text editor, saved, and opened again in the software and it will reflect the edits. SO far I haven't really done a whole lot with it, but I have added a row to a Base Device, which could allow for cramming even more stuff in. Each of these base devices only has 2 backplanes, but some of the cards can be split from their faceplates, attached with a ribbon cable, and allow you to add more stuff. As for Physically mounting cards, it's just eurorack. a 3u Eurorack frame could be stacked on top and could hold more faceplates, with ribbon cables connecting to the cards on the backplane.
My biggest limiting factor right now is the incompatibility between the different generations of the fiber cards. If I get more base devices, I'll need to make sure everything is using the newer generation. The Config I'm using now, with the older fiber cards, is set up for only the 2 base devices. At the moment, this is fine, but adding base devices is NOT something I can do with the software (probably possible with the xml file, but I'm not qualified) I'm also told that's something an order of magnitude more complex anyway due to how the fiber network functions. BUT, I also have a config that came with the newer base device, that includes fucking 28 base devices. So if I get more hardware, and have newer fiber cards for each base device, I can build out up to that limit, which is...ridiculous.
The hardware is nearly impossible to come by at an affordable price. It's a fucking miracle I found two different sales for the prices I did so close to each other. I'll keep some saved searches going, but I doubt anything else will come along in my price range for a long time.
Anyway, I still haven't hooked a ton of stuff up to it yet. I'm using a lot of the AES I/O to feed into the Euphonix format converter so I can pipe MADI into my PC. I'm considering hooking it up to an analog console, and/or a bunch of outboard stuff to route through. I still haven't fucked with the serial, logic, gpio stuff at all yet, but there's potential for some fun stuff there too. This shit's ridiculous. I love it. Here's a pic of the new arrangement:
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