Sonic Benefits

Sonic Benefits

great sonicsA Crookwood router can make your system sound better, as well as being more efficient.

There are lots of small factors, that all add up to make a difference that you can hear in your studio.

Remote Control

All of our equipment is remote controlled, so that the audio processing is done in remote racks, with a small controller placed in front of you.  This has several advantages both acoustically and electrically.

  • Acoustically, the controller is small and can be  moved out of the way when not required.  This allows you to minimise the reflective area in front of you. so you can get a more direct sound from your main monitors, so improving the stereo imaging of the room.
  • Because you can mount the remote racks near to the equipment they connect to (rather than near your hands as is the case with traditional routers, you can minimise cable runs between the racks and equipment.  Whatever you  think of cable sonics, less is most definitely more!

Constant Cabling

Cables and connectors wear as you use them. You get bad contacts, or dodgy wiring which adds noise, distortion and general uncertainty.  Because Crookwood routers integrate everything, you wire up to them once, and all of the routing is done internally with precision, balanced gas sealed relays, or digital routers.  The connectors we use cold weld on insertion, so you know that the sound will stay good forever.

Digital Power Supplies

Our routers have always had a good power supply system, which rejects RFI on the mains power, and distributes the power regulations local to each circuit, rather than globally. Now all routers come with our new digital power supplies, which amongst other things, remove all AC hum from the system, leaving a pure very quiet noise floor.  Our routers don't ever intrude.

Passive Relay switching

All of analogue routing, and selection is done with balanced, bifurcated, gas sealed relays.  There is no more perfect switching device, noiseless, no distortions, and perfectly balanced.  Of course they are bulky and expensive, but you don't get something for nothing!

Even our level trimmer and MS cards, are made from passive, relay based  attenuators, followed by a single precision output buffer.

Minimal active topologies

Wherever possible, we don't use buffers, and don't use multiple active stage.  The routers are predominately passive, with usually there being no more than one active stage from source to destination.