MM - Vocal Booth Wiring

[frederic]

No matter how you slice it, wiring sucks. It's boring, tedious, and easy to mess up should you be distracted. I'll be updating this thread as I make progress, which has been spotty lately for a variety of reasons.

Vocal booth jackplate:

As I posted on someone else's thread, I made a thin-wall aluminum box and mounted jacks on it, eight XLR and eight TRS phone jacks. I decided the cheapo plastic XLR jacks were a bad choice, so I got myself metal ones just to be on the safe side. The TRS jacks are also cheasy plastic, so I imagine I'll have to update them later on. I just can't be bothered at this point. So my recommendation to all of you wiring up your studios - don't skimp and use cheap, crappy jacks .

Marking and cutting out the wall towards the bottom of the vocal booth. Was a pain in the but because I couldn't find my blueprints for where the studs were, so I used some of my old, previously posted pictures on http://homerecording.com/bbs to approximate where the studs were. Quick hacking with a rotozip and the sheetrock and the plywood were sliced easily. First picture I've marked, second picture I've test-fitted the back part of the jackplate enclosure.


Here is a nice pile of somewhat short wiring snips left over from my pro studio. I'll be using some of this to wire up the vocal booth jackplate to the ADC patchbays on the other side of the wall in the producer's desk. More than long enough, and this is Mogami TRS low impedance cable. Years ago when that studio was carved out by the banks, I wasn't sure why I saved 8 billion 48" long TRS snips, but I'm glad I did. This saves a ton of money. BTW, this little pile is 1 of about 40 boxes of the snips I have:


While it's unlikely that the cable will be damaged, I decided to protect it anyway in case I have to deinstall the vocal booth jackplate. The plan is to wrap the wiring in electrical tape and shove it through this electrical fitting. Unfortunately the electrical fitting was too long, and interfered with two of the XLR jacks, so I had to stick this fitting into my surface grinder and take off a good 3/8" in order to have enough room for the wiring on the solder tabs of the XLR. Nothing is ever easy, is it? Anyway, I was smart enough to deck this part while the nut was still on, so I could (lamely) restore the threads after the 3/8" was taken off. Yay, done:


I have pictures of my soldering, however they didn't come out because I had the camera too close to the jack, and wasn't able to hold it still enough. So essentially they are blurry splotches of color, so I'll not post them.

Here are some of the jacks installed... many more to go...



Soldering tools... yes, I know, what a mess, but hey, I freely admit I'm a complete slob.


Here I've soldered some of the TRS phone jacks. Like I said before they are crappy jacks, but will do fine for now. Used more of the mogami snips.



I'll take pictures later today or tomorrow of the finished vocal booth jackplate, as right now it's installed, ready to be soldered to the patch bays in the producer's desk.

UPDATE:

Completed box, tested with ohmmeter to make sure nothing is shorted or broken:


Wiring pulled through vocal booth wall, now I'll have to pick up a can of spray-in insulation foam to fill in behind the insulation that was pulled, smushed, etc because I didn't run conduit like I planned. Yet another oops. But the spray in foam will be okay, and I can place a plastic cap over this and seal that with silicon or epoxy for an air-tight seal, not a big deal:



Completed vocal booth jackplate. 8 XLR on top, 8 TRS on bottom, with a fair amount of slack in the walls enabling me to pull it out about a foot if I need to repair, update or modify anything:


And of course, one needs outlets in a vocal booth. Probably not 20, but a pair of duplexes should be enough. I debated running two feeds to this outlet box, one for general purpose stuff like lamps, fans, that sorta thing and the other for gear. Then I realized I only have white outlets so making them obviously different would require a trip to Lowes or Home Depot, so the heck with it. All on one feed and I'll just have to have enough sense not to plug an 1800W space heater in the tiny, tiny vocal booth


Like the bling-bling outlet cover? It's leaving I assure you. Just waiting for the white plastic one to dry (I painted it green to match the moulding).

Lets talk about labeling cables. We've all used masking tape, "Avery" labels, mailing labels, even scotch tape and a sharpie, and we all know that eventually, some day (usually while you're installing it), these labels fall off and you're spending your next few days toning the snakes out. Here is what I did... a leftover from making automotive wiring harnesses using only white wire

The top row of jacks, have dots on the wires, ranging from one dot to eight dots, indicating the jack position in the jackplate. The second row, for the TRS jacks, are dotted the same way, except I put a dash in front of the row of dots on the wire. No dash - XLR jack. Dash - TRS jack. Easy, huh? Sharpie markers mark anything and everything so I use this hack of morse code to indicate wires. Just makes live so much easier, and since its a "standard" I use with all my wiring no matter what it is for, I can easily remember it.

Next up is the "master plan" of wiring from the front of the room, and the back of the room through the two toilet flanges that I've already installed (see other pics all over other threads). I ran an old piece of telephone wire between the two toilet flanges leaving some slack front and back, pulled it somewhat taught, and it seems with the necessary slack, I need to make all the pulled cables exactly 24', 5". So 25" is a nice round number, so I'll cut all the fiber optic, snakes, coax and cat5 to these measurements. Woohoo, nice and easy.

Pulled out my spool of shinkwrapped 24 pair TRS snake, and confirmed it is in fact 24 pairs, and 500' long. I need to run 8 snakes, so that's 8*25 = 200 feet minus any miscuts. Not too bad, plenty left over to make in-studio snakes (with TRS plugs) to go from the console table to the wall mounted ADC patch bays I'll have on that side. On the producer's desk side (with all the rackmount gear) I'll be using ADC patch bays as well, and the bays that connect to the equipment will be attached to the tons of 4' long Mogami snips lying on the studio floor at the moment. TRS plugs on the end of course. More work, much cheaper than buying professional grade snakes - since the TRS plugs and the cable are top quality. The TRS plugs are switchcraft, and were't cheap. I have a box of 750 sitting here in the garage. Anyway, the wiring plan, in a simple, easy to understand diagram:

[mshilarious]

Did I see a Rat Shack iron in there

[frederic]

Originally Posted by mshilarious

Did I see a Rat Shack iron in there

Yes you did. Not sure if all three were in the picture, but there is a 40W, a 25W, and a 40W with a chisel tip. Nope, only one was in the pic, the other two must have been on the floor at the time.

[MadTiger3000]

Originally Posted by frederic

Yes you did. Not sure if all three were in the picture, but there is a 40W, a 25W, and a 40W with a chisel tip. Nope, only one was in the pic, the other two must have been on the floor at the time.

Thank you for such informative "studio blogging." Your attention to detail motivates.