Opening up the Muse Receptor...

As mentioned, the issue with the Muse was identified as a hard drive failure - plugging in a monitor into the DVI output showed me the boot/post screen and provided the output string I sent to Muse Research, which then resulted in the answer as I understand it.

So given that this is just a PC - the post screen was the standard Intel logo of the motherboards from the past 4-5 years - I opened this machine up to take a peek.

First thing I saw - a SATA SSD mounted above the power supply, a white label
"06-22-2010
Michael Bluestein / John P.
Foreigner
Trillian"
so this machine used to belong to Michael Bluestein - keyboardist for Foreigner and an endorsee of Muse Research. Very nice!

Next - of course a confirmation that this is indeed Intel processor and motherboard, I'll be checking the spec out online to see which proc/mb pair it is. It's got to be something fairly recent since it's taking advantage of the integrated graphics components on the chip... hmmm I wonder if I can simply replace the processor/mb with a similar sized pair from the IVB or next gen line...

All the audio input/output components are using the PCI bus - a standup card plugs into the PCI slot and then the remainder of the audio signal chain is a separate pcb hung and attached to the back of the rack shell. This seems to be the only custom piece of hw in the box, along with the control and LCD display board & the dongle for the NI (and other) VSTs authentication. Its on a USB cable hot glued and tied down inside the case.

As soon as I can identify the mb and proc, I'll look into upgrading the RAM. Two of the four slots are filled - I'm guessing 2 GB RAM right now, and I can upgrade assuming BIOS & OS will allow that. There's a distinct possibility that the OS is 32 bit and upgrading to 4GB would render almost 1 GB useless. Another thing to investigate...

Which leads me to think "what's to stop me from doing something similar?" I mean, this is a VST host with an optimized custom OS intended to minimize latency from all sorts of other drivers and what not occupying cycles and memory (see: not Windows). With what is available today both on the Core side and Atom side, it would be pretty easy to put together a real keyboard in a box with one of the SoC/mb pairings, a SSD, sufficient RAM and with a small kernel Linux implementation containing audio signal generation/processing end up with something significantly more powerful than what any of the big brand name manufacturers are doing today or even the next few years.

Interesting... very interesting...

(btw - I wont post any pics from the inside of this unit. I dont want to contravene any potential restricted secret info as far as hw, and I dont really know yet the detail of the OS so cant comment)