https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-79394

Believe it or not this piece was rescued from being scrapped by my father, who had unique interest in both horology and was a professional electronics engineer. This clock was expertly restored on our family dining table at home - including the build of a new solid state power supply for it. I think the museum still powers up this clock for display, and you can watch the large neon decade dividers doing their thing.

EDIT: appears to have been removed from display according to the linked archive page.

I have at least one guitar that I rarely play but I keep because I consider it a work of art and a collectible. But, I have others which are workhorses and I play daily.

It gets awkward when collecting is presented as a way to be a better musician, which is clearly false.

I'm long overdue adding something, work has been keeping me occupied of late.

Compared to the anthropic offering is night and day. Claude gets on with the job and makes me way more productive.

Currently inside is an i7-9600 which I limit to 3.6ghz and a cheap 1050ti.

The CPU is technically over the TDP limit of the case but with the frequency limit in place I never exceed about 70degC and due to my workloads I'm rarely maxing the CPU anyway.

There is zero noise under any load. There is no moving parts inside the case at all, no spinning HDD, no PSU fan, no CPU fan, no GPU fan.

I love it. It's beautifully engineered. Top quality. It sits at the corner of my desk proudly silent.

I'm likely about to upgrade the pc within but the case will remain a strong feature of my desk.

Even this is still a problem, because it's unlikely they know even what question to ask. Or if a sensible question is asked it may be an XY problem, where what is really intended is not what is asked.

Having thought about this for the last few minutes, it does seem inevitable that the software would have to start coaching the musician in the ways of the engineering and of "music software" people, so that the inputs become more accurate and aligned with the outcomes the software is capable of providing.

I think everyone would crave becoming more productive in the environment over time and not have to suffer the initial baby steps forever.

It's very difficult to imagine a DAW environment which exposes deeper functionality that is not already like a lot of the existing packages.

Edit: and one final thought - it's a hard environment to build by the nature of the work being done being a creative process with no correct answers and which needs to support a multitude of different approaches to creativity. It's pretty opposed to software being generally a machine with a fixed number of functions

If the software was primarily driven by a command list back-end, had a bunch of semi-preset solutions to common problems, and also could be "spoken to" - would that feel more comfortable for our musician user?

Some have developed much further though to support a more digital-first approach.

But it's true that the barrier to entry can still be very high. Trying to explain any of these packages to a musician who is not also a computer power user is extremely challenging, believe me I've tried.

If we could arrive at a point where a DAW can be intuitive to a musician and not technically overwhelming that would be very interesting.

What would be more interesting though would be if that same project could be viewed in an "engineer mode" which exposes the technical view for someone else to work on at a different level.

There's a huge divide between people who might play with this at home as a toy and those who would be able to work with professional musicians with it.

The latter group will have some very strict requirements around performance, latency and workflow.

Edit: and reliability

This is absolutely not true. Latency in audio systems is important in almost every aspect of using a DAW