Here is some practical advice on how to set up a home studio, with tips on sound equipment, physical arrangements, and cables.

When setting up a working studio it is very important to take your time in thinking about where the gear will go, how you will connect it all together, how it will all interface with itself, and generally making it a nice environment to work in and be creative in.

The starting point of your new studios layout should always be the monitoring position. In a stereo system the two speakers and your head should make up the three corners of an equilateral triangle. That is, the distance between the two speakers should be the same as the distance between either speaker and your head.

This will produce a stable stereo image, and allow the speakers to project their sound correctly.

Once you have a suitable speaker placement and monitoring position, now arrange the rest of your equipment around you, starting with the most important and most used, and working down to the least important or rarely used. Think about making the regularly used equipment easily accessible, and position it in a place where you will not get annoyed each time you have to reach over for it.

It is easy to make the mistake of spreading equipment out, to make their studio look bigger. This may look better to your friends and family but what you will end up with is a studio that is hard work to operate, and therefore it will not be a productive place to work.

Before permanently cabling your studio, set it up and work in it for a day or so to test that everything that you like to use regularly is easily accessible, and not a chore to get to.

Think about how your equipment connects together, and write a list of permanent and flexible cabled items. This will help to organise the task.

For instance, the connections from your mixer outputs to your recorders’ inputs are usually permanent. These can be set up once, and forgotten about.

However, the connections between your mixer's channel inserts and a compressor’s inputs are temporary, you are likely to need to move this connection around, depending on which channel of the mixer you want compression to be applied to.

As a general rule all permanent cabling applications should be completed using multi-way looms, where possible - these are tidier, more reliable and consume much less space than multiple individual cables.

Temporary or moveable connections should be made via a suitable patchbay.

Patchbays act as a central nervous system to all of the equipment in your studio. They allow all of the equipment in the studio to be connected to the back of the patchbay, while the front of the patchbay is used to connect this equipment together using short, cheap patch leads.

Patchbays are cheap and readily available in today's market, from manufacturers such as Samson and Neutrik.
 

Many people underestimate and under-budget for  their cabling.

Remember, your studio is only as strong as its weakest link. You can have the best equipment that money can buy, but if it is connected together with poor cabling it will sound poor, be unreliable and may even get damaged.

We recommend that you buy good quality cables as these are the core of the system. Money spent on top-quality cables is not wasted.