Modular mixing boards are, unfortunately, a thing of the past, which is really a shame. The ability to arrange a board however you want has contributed to the degeneration of mixing sound from something considered to be an art to something considered to be a "necessary evil" at anything other than the biggest, most professional level.

We've been dismantling a 24 channel Brittish DDA board, with the double intent of being able to fix a few dead channel modules and simply being able to move it across the building (and down the stairs from the theater booth it was in!). It's been going to waste sitting in the back of our tech booth, but it's headed for a second life as the center of a small recording studio I'll be building within the facility.

I've also been experimenting with hard drives as speakers, a-la James Houston. I've got an array of nine functioning, but I need to retest some of them for polarity, because I think they may be running out of phase. They generally run at 8, 10 or 12 ohms, which luckily tends to calculate into ohmages greater than the standard multiples of 4, rather than less.

Photo is of DDA channel modules stacked up and waiting for contact cleaner... cheers!