r/Hainbach

Seeking an opinion from people experienced in test equipment! I have built a small test wall of mostly B&K stuff and am loving it.. I’m no test equipment expert and have only been getting stuff by recommendation. But this local lab is selling a bunch of cheap vintage HP gear and this seems to be the best piece, does anyone know if this is worth picking up?

I feel like I’ve seen similar in old Stockhausen studio shots but I could be imagining it, any help is much appreciated!!

https://youtu.be/VmCOK_9BP1I?si=JkyeyGALn0yzuw3R

I've been working on restoring a Teac Model 5 mixing desk with the Model 5 EX expander. Finished up cleaning all of the channels and the external housing so I wanted to put it through some paces to get a better understanding of signal flows within it.

Here I'm using MicroFreak as a source of pad sounds that are being arpeggiated at different time divisions. The echo send goes to two delay routes. The first is straight to my Marantz PMD430 for short slap back type delay. The second goes first through Venus Instruments Veno-Echo for longer Frippertronics length delay, which then goes into the second chanel of the Marantz. Both outputs are fed into separate channel strips on the mixer with their own feedback being controlled via that channels echo send knob.

Not really any sort of polished piece, or performance, just messing around with routing and settings. One thing I think I learned is I need a compressor for the inputs because some parts of the pads a different frequencies definitely take over unexpectedly.

https://imgur.com/a/UomBJ9y

So I know my way around synthesizers, but barely anything about test equipment... any ideas what could be done with these?

I’ve been working on a set of virtual instruments inspired by nuclear instrumentation modules (NIM) and other lab equipment, and recently started reworking the visual design to lean fully into that direction.

These run in VCV Rack (a modular synth environment), but the goal here isn’t to mimic typical synth UI. It’s to treat them more like pieces of test equipment that happen to make sound. In this case, they also interface with real analog hardware behind the scenes (and that's a longer story).

The design process started with vintage telecom gear, but NIM turned out to be a better fit: sharp, functional, unapologetically "scientific instrument." I leaned into that, while still trying to keep things usable as musical controls rather than pure visual homage.

A few of the details came directly from that world:

• BNC-style connectors (purely visual, but they help sell the idea)
• Slotted thumbscrews from NIM panels
• HP-style latching push buttons

One element I spent some time on was the turn-counting dial. On real hardware, these show position mechanically for precise adjustment. Here, I replicated that with a 7-segment display embedded in the knob itself. One full turn corresponds to an octave change, so it behaves more like calibrated equipment than a typical synth control.

I also tried adding LED glow/pulsing effects to the displays. It looked interesting, but in practice it was distracting, so I cut it. Might come back as an optional setting.

Curious if there are other details from this kind of hardware I should consider lifting. There are a few more modules to rework in this style, so additional ideas would be useful.