Producer Station Cherry

After a lot of research and much agonizing, I decided to purchase the Studio RTA Producer Station for my home studio. I was a bit worried by a couple of things I had read in other online reviews - the possibility of the rack rails not aligning properly and some disparaging remarks concerning the overall quality of the unit's design and construction. Still, I couldn't find another desk close to the price that offered the amount of workspace and utility of the Producer Station, so I placed the order.The desk arrived within the Amazon-predicted time frame. There was slight damage to the larger of the two shipping cartons, but since the unit was well-packaged, there was no damage to any of the components inside. Once I got everything moved into the bedroom that I am converting to my studio, I began assembling the desk. It took a little over two hours, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well everything fit together and also by the well-written and clearly-illustrated instructions. When I began loading the racks with audio gear, there were no alignment problems. And I appreciated the MANY rack screws that are supplied with the unit.The desk offers enough room to place my 76-key synth on the main surface next to my audio interface/control surface. The upper shelf easily holds my two 19" video monitors and powered monitor speakers (Yamaha MSP-5s). Once I had all of the equipment in place, I was glad that I opted for the Producer Station rather than one of the slightly smaller units.I highly recommend the Studio RTA Producer Station. It looks good in the room, easily accommodates a sizeable amount of gear, and is solidly constructed. No complaints here at all. Five stars.

This desk was bought for me by family that was attempting to help solve my ergonomics problems and space issues with my existing furniture. i wish i had spent more time at the store where i saw this thing before declaring it was what i wanted. My fault. The thing is, the idea of it is pretty good. Having built-in rack space is great. Having the pull-out drawer for desktop synths (my Virus TI fit perfectly on that drawer). However:- The upper rack/shelf piece of this desk is too high for comfort with computer displays and too short of width to accommodate good stereo separation with studio monitors.- The available desk surface area is poor. Very little depth available to place anything on the desk.- The rack screws this thing came with are rather soft metal and apparently somewhat nonstandard in thread. i can barely use them on my other racks, so the nice fact of a bag of these being included becomes insult when you find they don't work without massive effort. i've chewed up the heads of several screws putting them in and removing them. They're basically disposable.- The wheels make the desk too high. This is already a problem because the place where you're expected to put a computer display is too high. Even with a chair raised up to maximum height, the desk is too high. It's about exactly the wheel's height too high. Removing them, or not using them to begin with, sounds good until you realize this desk is difficult to move without them.- The keyboard tray frame/arms extend too low (where are we supposed to put our legs??). The keyboard tray issue is common. i've never installed a single keyboard tray on any desk that's come with one.- The plastic strip around the edge of the main desk surface was pre-assembled incorrectly. It's upside down. The sharp cut edge is oriented upward and the smoothed curved edge is oriented downward. Totally backwards. This makes a very sharp edge in contact with my arms as i work at the desk.- The left and right rack areas are a nice idea completely defeated by the flimsy metal side pieces. Since the back metal piece is used to provide stability to the parts that make up the "legs", there's no way to get to the wiring of your devices. You certainly cannot get to them from the sides. You're left with having to crawl underneath the rack devices to deal with connections. Bring a flash light down there with you.- The CD holder pieces on the far ends under the monitor surface are structurally necessary. If you think that leaving them out of the assembly is a good idea for desktop surface area, you're right, but you'll also encounter risk of damaging the desk if you attempt to move it much (say, from room to room or house to house, etc). If you tilt the desk enough while transporting it, the top portion will likely fall and tear the sockets where it was supposed to be secured. The cross dowels(?) holding the very top portion down onto the rack/shelf are totally useless for securing anything because they do not tighten whatsoever. They are always loose in their sockets. This makes the CD holders structurally necessary. But this is just bad design.- Somewhat top-heavy. Especially if you have the wheels on, a CRT and monitors on the top, and rack gear in the upper rack. Be careful when moving it. In the end, i actually removed the entire top rack/shelf piece of the desk so i could put slanted table-top racks on the main flat surface, at the far ends, pointing inward. This has actually been an excellent solution and is a design concept seen in more professional workstations made for studios, but this defeats the prime reason for having bought this desk to begin with. My end solution was to abandon a large part of what makes this workstation what it claims to be. Since this thing has no drawers (and rack drawers are not cheap), I'd have been better off with a large generic desk from Ikea or something similar, rather than this so-called "studio workstation."i don't recommend this desk if you are not tall, have a short chair, or nearsighted and prefer not to use near-range glasses (long distance glasses for up-close work tend to cause eye strain). i also do not recommend it if you still have a CRT, or if you need desktop surface area. Forget using the M-Audio ProjectMix I/O, as it will not fit here. Don't be fooled by the design concept, which is a nice idea. The ergonomics are poor, the assembly is poor (even if you are able to assemble it successfully, you may find that the basic parts are themselves wrong).Other than that, it's fine. :-P

Made in China....of course. So you know the drill... You get a lot for the buck, but what do you really get?Hey look, for 500 bucks or thereabouts, it's a lot of furniture. And, it's pretty heavy too. It's not junk. I don't regret the purchase, yet. But I think I will have a little bit of buyers remorse a year from now.First of all, It's not a bad unit. Hence the 3 stars, but it's not omnirax and it's not argosy.Observations from working with the unit for 3 months:The ergonomics are average, at best. The monitor and the speakers on the same horizontal plane are not good. The monitor is too high, speakers are too low.The shelf to house a computer underneath is not even close to large enough to comfortably handle a mac pro tower. You have to put it sideways so you can't access the front panel. This is not that big a deal because once you get everything set up, you really don't' need to get to the computer too much, but if you need to swap out Cd/dvd's a lot, it will be a pain because you have to crawl under the unit to get to the tower.The drilling for the rack spaces are hit or miss. A few of them are plainly off the mark. They do provide you with about a zillion rack screws however.A lot of wheels on bottom of unit so it feels solid. I'm rolling it around on low pile carpet, no issues.It is wide enough to house a Korg vintage 1998 heavy 88 key weighted keyboard, just barely! But it does fit. However the keyboard does block easy access to the bottom rack spaces that are housed under the monitor shelf.I'm using the pull out shelf under the monitor platform to keep my euphonix artist series controller tucked away when I'm not using it. I like this a lot.Worst feature: the slide out computer keyboard shelf under the desk does not have "stops" when fully extended! That means the shelf will move- while typing, if your legs hit it, whatever. Very annoying.You can see how this design was created when people used a million rack units but now that everything is moving to software, will anyone, especially young people on a budget (who is the target here), really use even a quarter of all these rack spaces? Probably not, and I'm not either. But that's ok because the two large empty spaces under the desk can be used for really anything you can imagine. Too bad they didn't put a printer shelf in one of those spaces. That would have been very excellent.In summary, for 500 bucks, it is what it is. Not bad at all. Not great at all. If you need something to keep your stuff on while saving up for something better, this could be your ticket.