My PC running Ardour is in my home office which is ok for mixing but not for recording (the PC and other servers are a bit noisy). I usually record on a digital multi-track recorder in my living room, where it is quiet and the accoustics are good.
I was wondering whether it is feasible to use a KVM extender to move my monitor/mouse/keyboard from the office to the living room, so I can record directly into Ardour. Does anyone have experience with such an approach? Other alternatives, maybe?
I can’t see why it shouldn’t work.
The only thing is that you also need a long audio cable from the mic in your living room and to the audio interface in your office, as well as a long headphone cable running the other way, for monitoring.
I agree with @peder that it should work.
Note that video and USB signals are limited in how far you can extend them on normal cables, and the cables are quite chunky. It’s worth looking for a KVM over Cat 6 cabling system which would allow you to extend the connection over a longer distance much more easily, and with a single cable.
Note that you should use cat 6 (rather than cat 5/5e) for these as the bandwidth is quite high and I’ve seen a lot of reports of issues using lower-quality cables.
Some of these also support audio but be aware that this may be via HDMI which is probably not that usable: HDMI audio has a quite high latency (probably too high for monitoring) and the audio would also need to be somehow extracted from the HDMI signal at the far end, which would probably require that your HDMI monitor had an audio output.
Also, the HDMI audio would be a separate audio interface from the recording device, which presents issues of its own.
For audio, you may be best running a separate cable from the audio interface monitoring outputs, perhaps using an audio over cat 5/6 system.
Or use an audio interface with ADAT and an extender.
An example (relatively low cost) setup for this could be a Behringer U-Phoria UMC1820 connected via ADAT to a Behringer ADA8200.
Cheers,
Keith
So a cat6 KVM extender would be the way. The required distance is about 15m, it doesn’t need to be a very expensive unit.
I would still use my R24 MTR for audio-in and out/monitoring, as well as control surface for Ardour.