4 Peripheral Devices to Spruce Up Your Gamestation

Device 01

A gas-spring monitor arm, with the cable channel routed into the desk

The monitor arm is the only peripheral that changes the geometry of your body. A good gas-spring arm holds a 27- to 34-inch display at any height and lets you pull it toward you for detail work and push it back for games. Set the top of the screen at eye level and the centre of the screen 20 to 25 inches from your eyes; for an ultrawide, tilt the ends toward you a few degrees so the edges sit at the same distance as the centre.

Where most desks fail is the cable. We route a 60 by 35 millimetre channel along the back edge of the walnut top before finishing, line it with felt, and close it with a flush oak lid held on 3 mm reveals. Display, power and USB cables drop straight from the arm's internal raceway into the channel and run to a single grommet above a drawer that holds the power strip. Nothing is visible from a standing position. The arm itself bolts through the top into a steel plate let into the underside, not a clamp, so the walnut edge stays unmarked.

Device 02

Low-glare bias lighting behind the display

Bias lighting is a strip of light behind the monitor that washes the wall it faces. Done well, it reduces the contrast between a bright screen and a dark room so your pupils stop hunting, which is where the headache after a long session comes from. Done badly, it is a rainbow strip that tints everything on screen.

The standard for colour work is 6500 K, matched to the display's white point, at roughly 10% of the screen's peak luminance, with a CRI above 90 so the wall does not shift colour. For a room that is also a living space we take a different view: we specify a tunable strip that sits at 6500 K during critical work and drops to 3000 K or lower in the evening, on the same circadian schedule as the room's architectural lighting. The strip is fixed to the back of a walnut valance, never to the monitor, so it stays put when the arm moves. The wall it washes is lime plaster at 0.82 reflectance, which spreads the light evenly and makes a low output go a long way.

Device 03

Studio-monitor isolation pads and the desk that supports them

Put a pair of powered studio monitors straight on a desk and the desk becomes part of the speaker. The top resonates at its own frequencies, bass arrives at your ears twice, and the mix you make will be thin everywhere else. Isolation pads, dense foam or a sorbothane layer under a rigid platform, break that path. They are the cheapest meaningful upgrade in this list and the one most often skipped.

In our desks the pads sit on a separate shelf cantilevered from the wall behind the desk, not on the desk itself, so keyboard impacts never reach the speakers. Tweeters sit at ear height, 1 to 1.5 metres apart, toed in to form an equilateral triangle with the listening position. The room matters as much as the pad: a 12-by-12-foot room with hardwood and plaster has a reverberation time well over a second, and no monitor sounds honest in it. The planner on our home page estimates the RT60 of your room and the square footage of wool felt or slatted oak needed to bring it down to the 0.3 to 0.4 second range a mixing room wants.

Device 04

A split mechanical keyboard, set to your shoulders

A standard keyboard forces your hands together in front of your sternum, bending each wrist outward. A split board lets each half sit under its own shoulder, so the forearm, wrist and hand fall in a straight line. Tent each half 10 to 15 degrees, high in the middle and low at the outside, and the forearm stops rotating against itself. The difference after a four-hour session is not subtle.

Switch choice is personal. For a room that doubles as a studio, we steer toward tactile or linear switches with a dampened case and a desk mat, because a clicky board in a room tuned to 0.35 seconds is startlingly loud. The desk height matters more than the switch: with the halves on the walnut top, the top of the home row should sit at or just below elbow height when your shoulders are relaxed. We set desk tops at 700 to 720 millimetres for most adults, or specify a sit-stand frame under a fixed walnut top where the user wants to move.

Everything above is the kind of detail we carry into a full room. If you are building or renovating a studio, office or gaming room, the right place to begin is the Elin Kelsey & Company home page.