Kasa Smart Power Strip - Power Up Studio Via Voice (VIDEO)

[James Steele]

So I ordered this Kasa Smart Power Strip on Amazon: https://a.co/d/gHiTzXe

Normally these are priced stupidly... like $80 which just wasn't worth contemplating. But Amazon Prime Days are going on (for another five hours) and price is now $39 so I ordered one when the sale started so I could test it out. It has six individually controllable outlets in the power strip and you can name them and also connect it with Alexa, so you can turn on or off devices in your studio by voice.

An extra benefit in my mind was that I could tuck this power strip down in my rack behind the gear and regain the precious rack space my ADJ "Pow-R-Bar" rack unit was taking up. My desk only has 8 spaces each in the left and right bays and I'd much rather be able to fit something else fun in there.

My big concern was would the power strip be able to connect with my WiFi router (in my living room) if it was placed down behind all that gear and inside the desk? This is why I ordered only one to start with. I'm happy to report that it has no problem staying connected to WiFi and as you can see in the YouTube video below, works nicely. Yeah... it's a little tedious having to use the "wake word" over and over and I may group some of these devices together so I can just say "Ziggy... turn on compressors."

Main thing is I can now reclaim some rack space for compressors or mic pres. I ordered a second one just now.

Anyway... just sharing this. It's also nice if I find myself sitting at my desk and checking out online forums or not actually doing any music related stuff at the moment to just turn off unneeded gear and save electricity with just a few words.

[bayswater]

Well that was a DOH! moment for me. I use KASA plugs for all sorts of things, but it never occurred to me to use them for this.

[James Steele]

Oh... I have to revisit this topic, because I didn't know much about Alexa. In the video I posted, you can see it was rather tedious calling out each piece of gear one at a time. Since then not only have I discovered "Groups" that let's me group my 76F, WA-2A, and Bus Comp into a group called "Compressors" and turn them all on with a single voice command... Alexa allows for ROUTINES!! I never knew this!

So I can just say "Alexa, power up studio!" And it will turn on each piece of gear in the sequence I arrange and also I can insert a Wait period in between. So I can power up my synth rack (that also contains my 24Ai) and my 828es, and then have it wait 30 seconds, and then power up my Compressors and then last thing are my ADAM audio monitors. I still have to use the power button to turn on my Mac Studio, but that's not so bad. But bottom line, I freed up rack spaces and have a pretty customizable power up sequence capability.

alexastudioroutine.jpg (66.42 KiB) Viewed 3282 times