Hardware system · In design
The industry spent the last twenty years moving everything into software. We're going the other way. A family of rack-mountable hardware units — dedicated, owned, unobsoletable by an OS update, designed to be touched. Names and specifics land when the work warrants them.
— The founder
"All of the hardware products need to be rack-mountable. Imagine a DAW in your rack mount."
The thesis
A rack DAW that boots straight into the software, with no general-purpose computer underneath. A drum unit whose face is the plug-in's face, one to one. A mixer with real motorised faders. A keyboard with chakra-coloured keys. All built on a single connecting protocol, in a matching family of enclosures.
People don't buy a single product. They build a rig. The whole rack is the instrument.
The four units
The drum-pad unit. Pairs ::1 with our drum plug-in — same controls, same positions, same labels.
A plug-in-editing surface and workstation host. Two editions — an entry edition and a flagship edition with a hybrid analog stage.
Two keyboard variants. Colour-coded keys. The physical home of our synthesiser's keyboard.
A motorised-fader hardware mixer. Mixer order decoupled from arrangement order, the way the engineer's ear actually hears it.
The full rig
Four units, one rack, one continuous instrument.
Shared design
Form factor
Standard 19″ rack width, heights chosen per product. Rear-panel jacks. Proper grounding. Balanced audio paths. Some units also sold in a snap-together desk-top variant.
Controls
Not absolute pots. Software can move the hardware to reflect a remote change. An LED ring shows the new position instantly; a pot can't move itself.
Audio I/O
Two-in, two-out analog stage per unit. ADAT optical I/O on every unit. Dock units together and their ins and outs add up — a stack behaves as one larger interface.
Connection
Units share a single USB connection to the host. A USB-C accessory port on every unit for peripherals and for firmware loading in bootloader mode.
Mode
Each unit can pivot between modes without re-cabling.
Enclosure
Each unit's user-facing edge curves up into a lip; its back edge curves down into a recess. Stack them and the lip slides under the recess — one organic instrument made of cooperating modules.
The ship line
Seven chakras, plus two finishes that work in any rig. Anodised-aluminium-inspired matte. Low metallic flake. Pads and button caps stay a uniform warm dark grey so the colour reads as the shell.
Foundation
The rack DAW boots straight into the workstation. There is no general-purpose desktop underneath it, no email notifications, no nothing. A purpose-built Linux image, stripped to what the music needs. The hardware can't host third-party software it shouldn't host — not because we won't let it, but because the appliance simply isn't that. Closed in the same way an analog console is closed.
That isn't a limitation. That is the appliance.
Why this matters
I
The software it runs, we control. The OS underneath, we control. There is no Windows-update Tuesday for a Chakra rack.
II
DAW. Drums. Synth. Mixer. EQ. Interfaces. All in one rack. All matching aesthetically. All on the same protocol. The suite stops being a metaphor and starts being a thing you can rack.
III
Software you can touch. Tools you own. A box on your desk that gets better over the years rather than worse.
What to expect
Hardware is in design. This page describes the family, the shared design language, and the thesis the units are being built around — it is not a release announcement. When release information is available, it will appear on the roadmap.