Advice needed on building a rack unit

[Esppse]

Hello,

I'm planning to put 16 drives/fuzzes/distortions into a rack unit box. I was wondering what things I should consider to avoid noise and all. I will be using a Voodoo PP2 to power the whole thing, but will only have 6 of its outlets available, which means 2-3 fx will need to be power daisy chained together. Only 1 effect will be on at the same time, and each effect will have its own input and output jack on the back, so each effect patches into a midi loop switcher.

So on the rear, there will be 32 Jacks for ins and outs, and 6 power DC jacks.

- Do I need to isolate the ground of each effect jack? Or can they all make contact with the chassis?

- Anything else I should worry about to avoid complications?

Thanks

[amptramp]

You have 32 jacks on the unit you are building and another 32 jacks on the loop switcher.  If you are always going to connect through the same switcher, maybe jacks are not necessary - just hard-wire between them or if you want to retain the ability to change the loop switcher, put all the outputs of your drive/fuzz/distortion unit on coaxial flying leads with a plug at the end so you can disconnect the unit whenever you wish.  The number of jacks and the failure rate of jacks can be a problem.

Grounding is a problem if you have current flowing through resistance between points that are supposed to be grounded.  Since you say only one unit will be on at a time, ground currents on an input will have an effect on other inputs but since they are not connected to anything else in the circuit, you should be OK.

[Esppse]

OK wonderful thanks for the advice!

[Esppse]

OOH, I've just decided to add VU meters for aesthetics. Ive got old tape machine VU meters from a Teac A3000.

I've worked with VU once before. It was a smaller VU meter, and I used a 9V driver board for it.

Can I used the same 9v driver board for these larger VU meters?

And can I daisy chain both VU meters(input and output) to the same power source or will that cause hum?