William Shakespeare famously wrote in the play Romeo and Juliet,

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

So this is my quandary today. What should I “officially” name my latest project?

Up to this point I have been calling my latest project alternately “Source Selector Unit”, “Source Selector Unit / Preamp”, “Source Selector / VU preamp” and a myriad of other names as the mood strikes me. If it was just for me, I wouldn’t even think about it. But this project is going to end up as a project page on the web site. And I want people to not only find it with out extensive searching, but also have an easy way to refer to the project; both mentally and in writing.

As an example, my project “The “Universal” Preamp” is the most popular project page on the CascadeTubes website. Over the last year this page has almost 8000 page views from almost 2300 different users. Not monumental for the internet from an overall perspective, but pretty reasonable for a little DIY website like mine. And lately, my project “The 12AU7 “Color” Preamp” has been getting a large amount of traffic. I think this may be largely to Stephe’s project build over on the Skunkie Designs YouTube channel. But the simple, easy to remember, and descriptive name is clearly not hurting.

In either case, both of these projects carry an easy to remember and unique moniker. For anything posted to the internet this is an important aspect of both driving interactions with users and being able to help people who might want to try the project.

This project started out as a simple passive switch box with a single knob. However, after completing the “The “Purpleheart” Signal Meters“, I decided that I wanted to incorporate some active level meters as well. Then I decided that signal meters weren’t much good without a way to adjust levels, so I added a preamp with +/- 20dB of gain. So the project has evolved. It is now clearly much more than a simple “source selector unit”. In fact, it’s much closer to what most people think of as a “preamp” from a system perspective.

I’ve thought about something like I’ve done for some of the amplifiers; simply highlighting the wood. This could be something like “The “Bubinga” Preamp”. But in those cases with the amplifier names, I always added at least the power tube number so that the name contained some context. I want the name to capture at least some of the functionality built into the project. But I don’t want something long or complicated. It needs to be short, pithy, and easy to remember. It also should be fairly unique so that it isn’t confused with a lot of other projects on the internet. In the preamp projects mentioned above, these requirements were met by the use of the labels “Universal” and “Color”. But I haven’t yet identified the right word, or combination of words, for this project.

I’m asking for some help. If anyone has any suggestions for names I could use for this latest project I would really like to hear them. Let me know in a comment or send me an email.

As always, questions and comments are welcome.