Running a snake through the wall

[KingstonRock]

Hi guys,

A friend of mine is looking to run a total of about 12-channels of cable through his wall from the top floor of his house to his basement. I personally would never record an instrument so far from the mixer and monitors, but its his only choice.

10 of those channels will be for mics going to the control room, and 2 will be for a stereo signal to a headphone amp from the control room.

He's looking to run the cables through the wall to a wall box with male connections for the mics and two 1/4 connections for the stereo line-level signal. The easiest way would be to buy a a 60 foot snake with no connectors, right? But would the same 12-channel snake support line and mic-level connections?

I've been looking around for wall boxes and snakes, from either mogami or canare, but I'm not sure what to get. If you guys could just hook me up with the model numbers for a wallbox or two and a snake or two that would fit these needs, it would be greatly apprieciated.

O, I realize they only make 8, 12, and 16-channel snakes, so 12 mic channels and then another 2, or maybe 4 to be safe, line level channels would be cool to.

Thanks a lot,
Eric

[knightfly]

Standard, pre-made snakes are almost always either 50 or 100 feet - they are available in up to at least 24 channel with (usually) 8 "sends", in other words with a total of 32 channels. There is no problem running line level and mic level in the same snake as long as you observe proper wiring and grounding techniques to avoid crosstalk.

For custom length and termination, try here -

http://www.clarkwc.com/cat700AudioSnakeAnalog.htm

For a 60 foot run, you may want to consider using digital audio cable - it has only about 40% of the capacitance of normal audio cable, and works fine for audio with the added benefit of less high frequency loss. It's not available at the above site in more than 16 total channels -

http://www.clarkwc.com/cat800AudioSnakeDigital.htm

The other advantage of using digital audio cable for your snake is that if you ever want to actually RUN digital audio, you already have AES spec cable in place.

While you're at it, I'd recommend pulling in a few Cat6 cables as well - one use is to put KVM extenders on both ends of one cat6 cable and control your DAW from wherever you can run a single cable.

Another use - probably too expensive right now, but 100 base T cat 5 is being used to run up to 16 channels of 24 bit digital audio, simplifies wiring. Do a google search on R.A.V.E., specifically on QSC's website -

http://www.qscaudio.com/products/network/rave/rave.htm

Like I said, this stuff isn't cheap at the moment, just something to consider... Steve

[KingstonRock]

Thanks a lot; also, do you know of any good place to buy a wall plate fitting of one of these setups?

If they can do 16 channels over 100 base t cat 5 with that R.A.V.E. set-up, I wonder if anything's stopping you from doing 8 tracks over the new 54 mb/s wireless, now THAT would be convenient!

[knightfly]

Is this the type you're looking for?

http://www.clarkwc.com/catPanel2.htm

Probably the only thing stopping multichannel audio over wireless is someone to make a box - if that particular setup uses cat 5 in or out, you could probably use the RAVE boxes and patch them thru the wireless instead of thru wires... Steve

[KingstonRock]

That's exactly it, I didnt see it on that site before, thanks a lot!

Running that RAVE set-up wirelessly would be great, but my friend is definitely looking for bang-for-the-buck.

Thanks again,
Eric

[MikeA]

Snakes usually are set up with 8, 12, 16, or 24 mic channels and either 3 or 4 returns. So for an 8 channel snake with 4 returns there are 12 individually shielded twisted pairs in there.

Based on "...and 2 will be for a stereo signal to a headphone amp from the control room" I couldn't tell if that meant that the headphone amp will be IN the control room or in the studio. I don't think that you would want to run mic signals up that snake and then have speaker level signals coming back down through it at the same time. It shouldn't be a problem though to run the mics up it and then a line level cue send back through it and amplify it back at the studio end where he is playing. Another thing, running the line level stereo cue signal back down the snake should take only 1 of the twisted pairs not 2. So he gains another mic line (or a second cue send) that way.

Check these guys out. They can put together any length snake you need and put connectors on one end, both ends, whatever.
They've also got wall plates and connector boxes too.

http://www.rapco.com/

Your best bet is going to be to get one end terminated the way you want and the other end bare. That way you can pull the bare end through the wall and terminate it at the box at that end.

[KingstonRock]

Originally posted by MikeA
Your best bet is going to be to get one end terminated the way you want and the other end bare. That way you can pull the bare end through the wall and terminate it at the box at that end.

I was hoping I'd be able to do that, and the headphone amp will be in the studio area. Do you think a pair of aux sends will provide a clear signal to the headphone amp even over the snake's length?

Eric

[KingstonRock]

Originally posted by MikeA
Your best bet is going to be to get one end terminated the way you want and the other end bare. That way you can pull the bare end through the wall and terminate it at the box at that end.

I was hoping I'd be able to do that, and the headphone amp will be in the studio area. Do you think a pair of aux sends will provide a clear signal to the headphone amp even over the snake's length?

Eric

[Todzilla]

If you are handy with a soldering iron, try www.markertek.com. They sell multi-pair cable by the foot as well as a variety of terminators.

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