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Hey, what's up? I'm KBHD here and welcome to reviewing everything on my desk. This is fun cuz I review a lot of things on this channel and it's going to be stuff that I've had for a few days or a few weeks or sometimes a few months, but this is the stuff that I've been using the longest that I know the best. A lot of this stuff I've been using for many years, some of it for over a decade. So yeah, this is stuff I'm going to know like the back of my hand cuz I've been making videos with it for many years. Now, we all know that the tools are just tools. This sculpture is not great because of the chisel that the artist uses, but you better believe that if that artist uses the same chisel for 10 years straight,
they're going to know it really well. So, let's start with the desk itself, which is actually kind of ridiculous. This thing here, it's called the Next Desk Air Pro. It has four legs, it's a sit-stand desk, and this surface on top is enormous. It's 96 in across by 38 in deep. So, it's basically 8 ft by 3 ft. And it's mostly crazy cuz this whole thing is like a quarter inch thick. It's this piece of aluminum and with all this weight on it, like this is a massive surface to have all this stuff here, it doesn't bend at all, which is kind of crazy. It doesn't rock or really shake. It's rock solid.
Uh this company doesn't really sell that much stuff or make that much other tech. It's just this particular desk, which I got nearly a decade ago. It happens to work perfectly and I think I'm going to this is like my forever desk. This thing is like a rock. Fun fact, I got this so long ago the company was still called Next Desk, but now they're called Xdesk. But you can see here over on this little controller over here, it still says Next Desk, so that's how you know it's an OG. Really my only complaint with this thing is that when you're raising and lowering the height of it, you have to keep holding the button. On almost every other standing desk I've ever tried, you just press the button. You press the one
button for your one height and the two button for your two height. This one you have to hold the one button to set it to your one height. It's such a minor complaint. Everything else about it is amazing. I'm giving it a nine out of 10. So, then next up is the chair, which is maybe a bit underrated in some setups, but this is also one of the most highly rated, kind of famous chairs of all time. It's the Herman Miller Embody, and it's one of the best investments I've ever made. Super comfortable. It has a ton of adjustability, but at this point, I don't adjust it anymore. It's just kind of molded around my back. Uh so, yeah, it's super comfortable. I had one back in college. I'll probably have
one for the foreseeable future. Great chair. I feel like the investment in your comfort and your back makes it worth it. I'm giving this thing a 10 out of 10. So, all right. Next up, on top of the desk is Let's start with the computer, which is the Mac Pro. And God, where do I start with this? This is probably going to be one of the first things to go. I'm not giving up on it yet, but I'm pretty sure Apple already has. This is the M2 Ultra tower Mac Pro. I got it I think this is now 6 years ago, and it was like 12, 13,000 dollars. At the time, it was Apple's most powerful computer. M2 Ultra, 24 cores, 76 core GPU, 192 gigs of RAM, and 8 terabytes of storage. But now, it's starting to age a little bit,
cuz we've seen the M3 generation of chips, and there's an M3 Ultra in the Mac Studio. That's the new most powerful Mac. And the M4 generation of chips, and then the M5 generation of chips, and the Mac Pro has not been updated for any of those. So, it's still obviously a very powerful computer. The one reason I got it is because I have one PCI card inside it. And the Mac Pro was built around expansion, so I do have an OWC, I think it's a 64 terabyte SSD for all of my live backups. Everything that we make, I back up to that SSD. So, this thing's been fine. It has all the pros and cons of a normal tower PC. A lot of people ask why I don't put it underneath the desk. It's because with a sit-stand
desk, if I put it underneath the desk, then the cables have to move up and down and reach it. So, it sits on the desk so the cables can be nicely hidden. Yeah, this is going to be replaced pretty soon. I hope there's an M5 Ultra Mac Studio soon that I can swap this out with and then like a Thunderbolt OWC SSD for backup. That's probably what it's going to be soon. Until then, it's fine. It's like four out of 10. So, that brings us next to the displays that I work with every single day, which is the Pro Display XDR. There's two of them.
I've had a dual monitor set up forever, but the Pro Display XDR, on its face it's actually kind of insane. It's a 60 Hz 32-in LED backlit LCD 16 by 9, no webcam, no speakers, and it's $5,000. And the stand that it's actually standing on is also another $1,000. And the nano texture finish is another $1,000. So, each one of these is $7,000. And for that price, you could get an entire setup that looks actually a lot like this. That's actually what we made the new studio video on, so you can check that out at the link below the like button. It's pretty sick. So, of course, this is a ridiculously niche product. You can watch my full review of the Pro Display XDR from a couple years
ago, so you can understand what they are and who they're for. Um I will say in this like brightly lit studio with a whole wall of windows over there, the nano texture is actually extremely effective, but it also makes them impossible to clean. So, if you touch it or if you get anything on it, it's just hard to get rid of that forever. So, I really try hard to keep these clean. But everybody else in the studio doing color has these, so we all know if we're matching and comparing and contrasting reference color, it all looks the same. I happen to use them on my daily setup, which means I do a lot of also non-video editing on them, and that's when I wish they were higher refresh rate, and
that's when I wish maybe they'd have a couple more features, uh but they don't. And I also have speakers and a webcam separately, so they're fine. This is my Opal C1 webcam plugged into one of the ports on the back of the monitor. It's nice that they have ports on the back. I'm not going to review this webcam cuz I invested in the company, so obviously I think they're great, but I'll stay away from that. But, I'm going to give these an 8 out of 10. Now, these displays are standing on the desk, not on this shelf here, but I do still have the shelf because it's nice for a little bit of extra storage. So, this is made by Grovemade. I mainly keep like smaller items in here, cables, SIM card removal
tools, pens, flash drives, a Sharpie, stuff like that. Uh it's just a handy little place to sort of stow things away. These are pretty pricey. I remember Grovemade sent them over, and they have a bunch of different colors. This is the black version. I think they're pricey because they should be able to support a bunch of weight if I actually did have dual monitors on top of it, but they're not. So, you could easily replicate this exact same effect with something way cheaper. That said, it does exactly what it's supposed to, and I like the way it looks. 10 out of 10. So, then next up, all the way over here, is my audio interface. So, there's a digital to analog converter in here, a DAC. A lot of
people do this internal inside the computer. This would be a PCI slot in the Mac Pro or whatever they're doing, but this one's external, and it plugs in by a Thunderbolt, and it also is this giant glorified volume knob, which I find very satisfying. But, yeah, it plugs into both the speakers and the headphones. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that comes with it. Like, there's a whole bunch of software. There's a bunch of plugins that you can use with it. I don't use almost any of them. The software is also honestly really buggy. I have to reset it all the time. Sometimes I update it, and it forgets what it is, and I have to
download new firmware. It's kind of more of a pain than it should be, but it gets the job done. There's a lot of other things again that could get the job done, but we've been using this here for again many years. I just wish it didn't have so many issues. It's like a four out of 10. Now, the speakers, I think they're iconic at this point to just the look of my desk. I love these things. So, this is a pair of Yamaha HS8s. They're active near-field studio monitors, reference monitors, whatever you want to call them. Yeah, I've had these forever. I love these and they happen to be pretty good at everything. Like they're good for just general reference listening, video editing, audio editing, but also just for music listening. I don't need a
subwoofer with this setup because these will get all the way down to the 40 hertz range. This big 8-in woofer does great. There's also a 1-in tweeter up here. They only have a couple sort of weird quirks. Matter of fact, this is a wireless charger that I'll get to in a second right next to it, but the shielding on these is imperfect, I guess. Uh because if you have a phone like right next to it for long enough, sometimes like RF interference, you can actually hear on the speaker and I'll hear like a little faint buzzing sound. Sometimes like right before I get a call or a text message, I'll hear the speakers buzzing and I know I'm getting a signal, which is crazy.
Anyway, typically they perform great, they sound great. I know exactly what they're supposed to sound like from sitting between them for so long. I have no complaints. There are probably technically better monitors out there that I could switch to, but I know these so well. 9 out of 10. Okay, so the headphones of choice, these are a couple years in now, are these right here. These are my Sennheiser HD 650s and I wear them a lot during the day.
Oh, and they happen to be on this pretty generic uh Kanto uh stand. Any stand will do. But, I like these a lot because uh I wear them a lot and they're very light and comfortable and they're open back and they sound really good. So, Sennheiser has a whole range of products. You can kind of you can see that they're open back. They have this uh sort of a mesh-looking look here, but I've basically been wearing open-back headphones in the studio because people will talk and ask me questions while I'm editing or doing whatever on the computer and I can hear them and I don't have to take the headphones off and that's pretty nice. They also sound really good, really great for reference
again editing, and also occasional music listening. And yeah, they're wired, they plug right into the DAC, they don't really have any flaws. There are again technically better headphones out there, but I just know these really well. I was trying to think of what I would change about them or what I would do to them. The only thing I could think of was wireless would be nice, but that means adding a battery and probably some weight and maybe less comfort. So I guess I probably wouldn't do that. These are great. Eight out of 10. Now I got two chargers on my desk. One is this one right here. This is a Belkin three-in-one charger. It's a three-in-one cuz it can charge a phone here with a magnet. It can charge
another phone here without a magnet, two Qi wireless chargers, and one Apple Watch charger. So I've got an Apple Watch Ultra here. Fun fact, you can hot swap Apple Watches and they actually like pick up where the other one left off. It's kind of sick. Anyway, yeah, I can just slide this way when I don't want it, but obviously this is useful for charging devices. Not super fast, it's probably like a six out of 10. And then over here is my fast charger. Again, I already know it's too close to the studio monitor and I'm just fine with that. But this was made a long time ago by Oppo, I'm pretty sure, cuz it's an Airvooc charger, and I've got a OnePlus cable attached to it with a
whole bunch of power underneath the desk. And this is nice because basically any phone, no matter what size, will work if I just place it on it. Usually lines up with the wireless charger in the phone or the coils on the back of the phone. That's usually my good fast wireless charger. Eight out of 10. So then in the middle here I've got a kind of a weird combo setup going on and it's because of the way I've edited in Final Cut Pro for like the last decade, so you can blame Final Cut Pro for this, but I have a mouse and a Magic Trackpad. Uh this is the USB-C one, not that it matters, but um I use the wireless trackpad and the mouse at the same time for side scrolling on the timeline usually or
scrolling and moving around and pinching and zooming and then the mouse for everything else even though the mouse has all that functionality built in. Just the way my brain is wired. Anyway, so that's there. That dies every couple weeks. That sucks. I hate that. But this is the mouse but I'll start with the keyboard. It's called the Rainey 75 Now I've had a mechanical keyboard on my desk for a while. This is actually the newest addition. I had a Keychron before this for a couple of years. Basically everything that I know about keyboards or do with the keyboard on my desk is because of what Andrew's told me to do
and he's usually right. He's like try this you're going to love it and then I have it and it's great. So my only real requirements for a keyboard basically are that one it works for a Mac, two it has all the common keys that a Mac uses and I don't need a numpad and three it's wireless and that does all of these things and this is also like a rock solid super heavy keyboard. It also has this artisan MKBHD keycap on the corner which is pretty sweet and a couple other custom Keychron Dolch keycaps. So it's a bit of a hodgepodge setup going on here but I know people will want to hear it so big fan. Battery life on this thing is pretty good for a couple weeks at a time. I always turn the backlight on
these keyboards all the way down just to make them last longer. Um and also price-wise this is the Rainey 75 light. It's one of the better priced items of this entire setup. Really good for the money so that is uh something I don't regret switching to recently. 8 out of 10. And then this is the mouse. This is the MX Master 4. This is their newest. You can see they have actually uh engraved my name on it. They brought these here to the studio a little while before they came out and they said try it out. Let us know what you think. Turns out they're great.
They're silent. They have really good software. On the 4 they added haptics. So I'm not a gamer. I'm not using like a super high refresh rate like super low latency mouse. This is just again it's a 60 hertz display and I just need to get my work done and edit, and this does great for that. It's gotten the job done, and it's definitely going to age a lot better than the previous MX Masters. People who have those mice know that the finish on them wears off and rubbery, it just doesn't look great after a while, and I think this is going to do way better. So, I really like the mouse. 9 out of 10. And then last but not least,
this is something I maybe get the most questions about, which is the mouse pad. This is the Artisan Ninja FX mouse pad. It's It's something I got into specifically maybe 5, 6 years ago. No, probably longer than that. Uh I like the color, the shape, the texture, the firmness of it. And then when it started to wear out, cuz I'd used it for so long, I looked online to try to find another one, and it was kind of impossible to find, and I think I had to import one from Amazon Japan for like $75. But they still sell them, so you can still get them. I'll try to link everything I'm talking about below, but uh I have a mouse pad over here on the right for my mouse, and I have a second one over here that I've had for years,
which is just my soft surface for things that I keep on my desk, cuz this is metal. So, these are the phones that I haven't wiped yet that I'm still testing, my table tennis paddle from Adam Barbaro, shout out to him, and uh whatever car keys of a car I'm testing, my Ridge wallet, of course, hand sanitizer, some keys, the stuff that you sort of just have on the desk lives on this one. 9 out of 10. I wish it was a little bit more durable, cuz I have to get one every like 2 years, cuz they sort of wear in, but it's pretty great. But that's my desk. That's all of the stuff that I've been using on the daily for an extremely long time. As someone who has a lot of choice in this, you kind of get an idea, a little peek
behind why I chose this stuff, what stuff's working well, what stuff's going to be gone soon. If you want to see a similar version of this setup for the price of less than one of these displays, click here for the studio video. Trust me, that stuff's also really good. All right. Catch you in the next one. Peace.
