At the heart of the Spoon Audio studio is a 3GHz Pentium-4 PC, with 1Gb of DDR400 RAM, and a dual-channel Asus P4C800 Deluxe motherboard. The system also houses 6 hard disks totalling over half a terabyte of storage and an 80Gb DLT Backup solution.

Because of the hard disks and other hardware including a GeForce4 graphics card, SCSI card, RAID card and M-Audio Delta-66 sound card, this system generated a lot of heat. After trying a variety of air cooling methods – all of which produced too much noise - it was decided that investment in a water cooling system was warranted. Some fans were still required to lower ambient case temperatures, but running these at a lower speed helped combat any increased noise.

While recently replacing the Adaptec 2400A RAID card that never performed well with a Highpoint RAID card, I took the opportunity to upgrade the storage capacity and replaced the existing disks with larger Serial ATA drives. This helped reduce the space occupied by cables and increased airflow within the case, aiding cooling.

The CPU, hard disks and graphics card GPU are all cooled using Koolance’s excellent water cooling solution. I recommend this easy-to-install cooling solution to any enthusiast with deafening noise levels caused by countless fans.

Although most of the sounds are generated by the PC, there’s always room for hands-on action with some external MIDI kit – a Novation Supernova II rack version. The Samson amp powers two SoundCraft Absolute II studio monitors (tempted to replace them soon due to poor bottom end performance) and I’ve also recently invested in a Midex8 USB midi interface which quite simply rocks for stability.

Finally, there’s the stand which contains the mixer, Korg MS2000, Korg Kaos effects pad and Evolution MIDI mother keyboard. Also in the studio (but not pictured) is a Midiman Oxygen 8 MIDI controller keyboard.