I've been doing this for more than 30 years, and one thing I've noticed is that we spend a lot of time talking about the items that almost never ruin a session, such as microphones, compressors, plug-ins, and converters. Meanwhile, the gear that's actually capable of bringing an entire day to a halt barely gets mentioned. The drive that won't mount, the network that suddenly acts weird, the adapter that broke overnight, and the cable nobody packed because they assumed somebody else did. I've never had an artist stop a session and say, "You know what this song needs? A different Thunderbolt dock." But I have absolutely watched the energy leave a room because technology got in the way of the work. That's become more important lately, as the modern studio isn't really a room anymore. One day I'm in my own studio, the next day I'm working in somebody else's, and sometimes the artists or producers are elsewhere. Many times, even the files are somewhere else! The studio has quietly become a collection of systems.
A few years ago, I sold off a bunch of gear and rebuilt my room from scratch – not because I wanted more gear, but for less complexity, clutter, troubleshooting, and opportunity for something stupid to ruin a perfectly good day. At some point, every single component in a workflow ends up carrying one hundred percent of the responsibility for whether the session continues or stops. That's when I started looking differently at infrastructure, power, storage, networking, and connectivity... studio stuff that nobody puts on Instagram.
Today, I depend on various Other World Computing (OWC) docks and hubs, like the 11-Port Thunderbolt Dock, Thunderbolt Go Dock, and Thunderbolt Hub, each of which I leverage based on the task at hand. For instance, I use the Thunderbolt Go Dock when I’m remote and the Thunderbolt Hub when I am pulling together a small setup. I’m also able to daisy-chain them with zero issue. In my mind, these provide a modular tool set for anything thrown my way. They expand my Apple silicon environment with no degradation. These independent Thunderbolt lanes can feed other units with more lanes. It’s insane. And they do their job just as well as my $12,000 speakers and $5,000 compressors…
However, one of the biggest and most powerful changes for me recently was the ability to build everything around a single connection in my studio. My laptop now plugs into an OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dual 10GbE Network Dock. Everything else plugs into that. Storage, displays, interfaces, and network are all via one cable. That may not sound particularly exciting. But I've learned that exciting and reliable are often competing interests. I want to connect to one cable when I walk into a room and know exactly what my day is going to look like. Because so much of what we do now lives on networks, that's become especially important. A lot of engineers still think networking is something IT people worry about. Today your sessions live on storage systems, collaborators are remote, files are moving constantly, backups are happening in the background, and audio and video are traveling over networks. Whether you like it or not, you're running a network.
One thing I like about the Dual 10G dock is that it gives me multiple independent network connections. That sounds incredibly boring until you need it. Connections can be handling storage, dedicated to audio, or handling internet traffic. Everything gets its own lane. The whole system feels calmer and more predictable – probably the highest compliment I can give any piece of technology. I don't want surprises; I get enough surprises from musicians. What I've discovered over the years is that the best equipment tends to disappear. I stop thinking about it. That's really all I've ever wanted from technology.
At the end of the day, nobody remembers what dock you used. Nobody remembers what network switch you bought. Nobody remembers what adapter was plugged into what. They remember the record. And anything that helps keep the focus on that is worth paying attention to.