DonDish
Senior Member
Ever since I got the ADI-2 Pro fs r be and saw the pin-out scheme in the manual, I wanted to expand on this. A hobby project. Combine some skills and gain some new. I have a (very)small woodworking shop in my basement. Some basic machinery and handtools.
The DB9 pinout. AES and Spdif I/O
UCXII and ADI2pro are small 9.5" boxes with not much real estate so I/O is expanded via a breakout cable. It does the job, but I wanted a more elaborate solution. This is an ongoing project and I would call this V.0.75. A working prototype so to say, story of my life.
Top picture is faceplate. It consists of two pieces of mirrored vietnamese ebony and some pieces of Gaboon ebony glued to birch
x-veneer. I dont make plans, but rather sketch and make notes on the way.
Front and back with drilled holes for Neutrik D-type contacts. Back is sapwood from vietnamese ebony on x-veneer.
Tryout with contacts. Not final config. DB-9 is top left.
I wanted a lighting effect ala ADI-2 pro. Did these grills as a test. Routed from a single piece of wood with 3mm rib spacing and 5mm thick. Amazing this didnt break. There is a small skew to the ribs due to misalignement in my router jig. Not very noticeable. These ended up in final product.
Assembly. Three compartements, left and right will house the effect lighting. Bracing is just scrap pieces of cherry, apple and pine x-veneer.
Reflector for light. Aluminum reflector cut out from a harvested fluorecents fixture. Just follows natural curve of box, I drilled two screwholes to hold them in place. The clamps in picture is the only thing to not make it pop out. I pondered lots of ideas here. Twin parabols and other. That would be for a later project..
Reflector screwed down.
Void behind reflector is filled with leadshot and epoxy. Lead is about 400g for a nice heft.
These are twin amber LED´s, epoxy glued between pieces of wood. Just soldered point to point. Four LED´s to each side. Resistors are calculated for 5V USB power supply.
Virtually impossible to get a nice shot of this. The square amber LED´s make very nice horizontal streaks in the reflector. When viewed from forward they go from side to side.
This is NOT how it looks. Camera picks up the red light in an extreme fashion to make it look like a heater oven. In reality light is only just a bit brighter than LED´s from ADI-2 pro. Not intrusive in any way. Im a bit sad I cant give it justice here.
Final assembly of box. Lid is 2mm cherry lined with ebony.
Final assembly of AES and Spdif contacts. AES I/O is mirrored to backside AES. I could use some more skill and routine to my soldering, altough pretty straight forward and my hair has turned a bit more grayish. Internal cabling is shielded 110ohm and 75ohm coax. I got the nice slim installation cable I wanted, about a €/meter. I test regulary for continuency so everything is OK with no wrongs or stray copper wire. Every solder point is tested to every other. I made a 40cm DB cable from same stock as internal wire.
Nice stack!
Just got this up. Did some loops with AES and Spdif so everything seem to work. I will be looking to make some tests with longer cable runs and bit tests. At this point everything seems fine. TBH I cant wait for the next iteration of this. Planning to do a stereo bench type thing for my RME boxes. With shelves, complete I/O and built in lighting. I have already selected some really stellar veneer for that project. I will make an update post with added pictures for this project, soon.
