"Most glue is all about routing. But there's a mile of difference between a generic router and an optimised specific router"

"Productivity is simply a measure of how much work you can get done within a given time. Increase your productivity, and you get more work done"

Crookwood Products: igloo Consoles

There are many "niche" markets which aren't big enough for the big audio desk manufacturers to get involved with. The result is that these markets make do with existing desks, built their own custom console, or bodge.

Crookwood igloo's are a range of hardware and software modules that can be combined to make a router/monitor desk to your exact specification and topology.

It sounds simple, and in many ways it is, however it's utter flexibility makes it difficult to describe, and sometimes to specify. Because of this, there are several pages to look at, in order to completely understand the igloo concept:

igloo Navigation

Overview. A thorough overview of the igloo concept.
Hardware. All about the processing cards and rack framework.
Controllers. About the user control panels.
Software. An insight into the integration power of the system.
Specifying. How to specify your ideal desk.
Clients. Who's bought igloo's and what did they specify.

Overview

The igloo stands for "intelligent Glue", which describes quite well what it does. An igloo system glues all of your outboard equipment together, giving you a cohesive integrated user interface to control it all from - much like the way the old centre section of an analogue desk integrated the desk to the rest of the studio.

Just doing this well gives you 3 main advantages: Productivity, Confidence and Sonic Integrity.

Productivity. Having simple control buttons that automatically route several routes with one button press, dramatically reduces the amount of time you spend fiddling with wire, patches and equipment, giving you more time to concentrate on the audio, or get more work done.
Confidence. Knowing that you can just hit that button and hear a device means you can quickly cross check work as you move forwards, and you don't have to keep routes or patch information in your head: it's clearly labelled in front of you.
Sonic Integrity. We use high grade components, and clever technologies. Our desks are very clean and because they're all remote controllable, the main audio processing bits can be mounted very close to the audio gear, minimising cable runs and connectors. It's a win-win situation.

All this technology doesn't have to be too expensive. The cheapest igloo system is about £1,500 ($3,000), the most expensive we've ever made was £8,000 ($16,000).

So how does it do it?

Modular electronics. OK, that was quite brief explanation, so here's a more lengthy one:

An igloo system is comprised of:

The Brain - A central raw Power Supply and processor rack.
The Workers - A number of identical slave racks that house the processing cards.
Cards - A number of processing cards, of different types (relay routers, speaker controllers, digital routers etc).
Wiring - Internal rack wiring and specified Client side wiring to get all of the signals in and out of the Worker racks, and distribute them to the right processing cards.
Controllers - A number of front panel control modules (we've 3 basic types).
Software - Client specific software to bind it all together.

The process of putting it all together

Once we know what you want to do with you igloo, we can start to put it together.

The first thing is to work out how many processing cards you need. Multichannel work, uses up more cards, but the client software slaves them together to work as one. Once we know how many cards you've go we can then work out how many Worker racks you'll need.

Each rack and each type of card is identical. It's the client software and wiring schedules that determine what this desk is going to do. This makes the production process of building and testing the desk really easy.

Once produced, the wiring schedules are sent to the client so they can start the wiring preparation for the studio.

The front panels are chosen from our 3 basic types of panel, and again the client software determines how the panels will operate. If the client wants a true custom controller, we can do this - it just adds cost and time, but it may be the correct solution for that client.

Finally the software is written for the client, and the whole unit tested to make sure it does what the client expects. The key to the igloo's power is in this software. Effectively a macro language (that we invented), is used to bind a control button to certain hardware actions. In this way a single button can do many things (routing analogue and digital signals, muting monitors temporarily, altering meter levels etc), but each little macro is a well known and proven bit of software, that doesn't need to be re-written for each client. Typically it takes about 4-16 hours to completely write the code for a client from scratch. It took 4 man years to write and test all the little macros used however...

Because the desk is complex, often the client may want to alter how it works when they get it. 9 times out of 10, this can be done with a simple software update or a change to the external or internal wiring schedules. Compare this to how you'd change a true custom desk! For the same reasons, expanding or upgrading the igloo is easy as well.

So what do I do next?

Look around the igloo site. The links at the top of the page will take you around. When you've had a look and think you're ready to move forwards, call us, and we'll speak further. Your life will never be the same again!