New WFH Setup

Since March 13, 2020 I've been working remotely from home, along with my wife. Our house is not setup for 1 home office, let alone two lol....

To start with we both had our desks in the master on either side of the room. This proved problematic as I'm on conference calls throughout most of business hours which was distracting her.

So we moved her "office" to one side of our loft. I continued to work in the master bedroom throughout most of 2020. I realized toward the end of 2020 that this was not an ideal setup and was taking a mental toll on me (going to bed looking at work and waking up looking at work).

I determined I needed somewhere with a door so I could compartmentalize work from home.

The only place that was even an option was our master bedroom closet... which is an interesting choice to say the least lol.

I went to work and made a bunch of room at the back of the closet and ended up with about a 6 foot wide x 5 foot deep space and set myself up with a folding table to start with.

Scouring Facebook Marketplace netted a pair of old desks that were perfect for the space. One of them would span wall to wall (once cut down from 8' to 6') with a section to put the docking station for work and some other stuff. The piece I cut off also will function later as a shelf (for the turntable). The remaining desk will be in my garage for now but offers some flexibility if I ever decide to expand things.

Working from home with no co-workers to complain about music gave me an opportunity to setup an office rig of more than just headphones. I have a fair amount of various gear not in use, and some from my actual work cubicle (brought home when it became clear I wasn't going back after a couple months). Originally I wanted to do a DIY pair of bookshelves using some repurposed cabinets, and then slowly would build up a full little tube rig. After thinking on that and doing a fair amount of pricing etc I realized that was going to just be too much, and honestly outside my comfort level and take a long time to build.

I decided to simply the wiring and just go with a pair of powered studio monitors. I originally was looking at KRK's (the Rokit 5 or 6's) and realized they were going to be both too big and too outside my budget.

I remembered the thread from X where someone mentioned PreSonus (and @VR3 mentioned Mackie). With my self imposed budget of 300 all in for the speakers/sub I ended up with a pair of PreSonus Eris 3.5 and Sub 8. I also needed to reduce the fire hazard I was using to power everything (powerstrip into powerstrip, into powerstrip). Did some digging and ended up with a TrippLite Isobar PDU. I had a tube headphone amp, tube phono preamp and turntable already. Lastly I had been wanting to upgrade my Raspberry Pi so took the opportunity to add the official 7" touchscreen and a case for it.

At the end of the day I ended up with a pretty nice office setup.

Sources:

• Raspberry Pi 3B+ w HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro HAT running Volumio (has access to my music on my DNLA server, Spotify, and Pandora). Controlled via 7" touchscreen or the Volumio app on my iPhone
• Technics SL-B3 (not shown) paired with a Yaqin MS-22b Phono preamp

Pre-Amp:

• Harman Kardon Signature 2.0

Speakers/Sub:

• PreSonus Eris 3.5
• Sub8

Power:

• TrippLite Isobar PDU
• Furman AC-215A

Cables:

• Audioquest YIQ-G component cable (Pi -> HK Signature)
• MIT EXP (HK Signature -> Eris 3.5)
• Blue Jeans Cable LC-1 (HK Signature -> Sub 8)
• Pittdog Special (Yaqin MS-22B -> HK Signature)

Headphone setup:

• Little Dot 1+ tube amp
• Beyerdynamic DT-770 32ohm headphones

All thats left is some future upgrades I would like to try which may include:

• C7 cable for Eris 3.5
• Better powercables for the Sub8, HK Signature, Little Dot 1+, and Yaqin (nothing fancy, just something better than stock)
• HiFiBerry Digi2 Pro Hat (would let me use the BlackCat Veloce cable I have and love and go digital into the HK Signature)
• Ifi iPower or iPowerX (to power the Pi from the HiFiBerry DAC) or 5v linear PSU (thinking TeraDak)
• Another set of midgrade RCA's so I can run from the HK Signature to my Little Dot
• IsoAcoustic ISO-130 stands

The setup sounds quite nice even at very low volumes. I also am reminded how nice it is to have an enclosed space on a subfloor for bass (both tactile feel and SPL). This setup has helped make working a lot better.

Here are some pictures. Worth noting is I have been able to keep all the cables separated. The IC's are run independently of powercables for any of the gear. I do still have some cable management as I want to get some cable raceways to better keep the IC's and whatnot hidden along with the cables for the powered sub/speakers which are intentionally using that Furman so I can turn them off independent of the entire stack of gear.