making an XLR snake, is it really cheaper?

[Wireneck]

I did a search on this but didn't really find anything that directly answered my questions. Im thinking about building an XLR-XLR 8-10 (not sure yet)channel snake with 2 or 3 1/4 jacks for headphone sends and about 50ft in length.
My question is, is it really going to be that much cheaper to buy the raw materials and make this myself? All the sites on the net that i looked at the raw cable the price was still going to come out pretty expensive. I don't by any means need the most expensive cable at this point nor do i have the money to spend on it. Is there anywhere that I can get some cable suitable for this task that isn't going to kill my wallet but also not be total krap? I just need something sort of in the middle. Useable yet affordable lol, maybe im asking for too much. Any ideas?

[jrosenstein]

by making your own, you can make excellent cables for the price of mid-range ones. you won't make your own for cheaper than Hosa, but on the bright side, you won't have any hosa cables.

markertek.com is good for this kind of stuff. check out their Belden audio snakes, very reasonable.

[muttley]

Also how much time do you want to spend soldering everything? Do you have soldering gun and solder??


da MUTT

[Wireneck]

with a soldering iron. He was going to rig everything up for me if i bought the materials. I can see that this is going to be expensive regardless though, so im going to have to hold off on making a snake for right now.

[TexRoadkill]

I don't really see the savings in DIY cables. I'm pretty happy with the higher end ProCo and Horizon stuff. Without even doing the math I can pretty much figure that some guy in china's time is a lot cheaper than mine

[jrosenstein]

Originally posted by TexRoadkill
I don't really see the savings in DIY cables. I'm pretty happy with the higher end ProCo and Horizon stuff. Without even doing the math I can pretty much figure that some guy in china's time is a lot cheaper than mine

i think that this BBS, where people spend hundreds of dollars and weeks of their own time to avoid a $500 bill at a recording studio, is the wrong place to be talking about workforce efficiency!

[TexRoadkill]

Originally posted by jrosenstein
i think that this BBS, where people spend hundreds of dollars and weeks of their own time to avoid a $500 bill at a recording studio, is the wrong place to be talking about workforce efficiency!

lol, good point. But would they rather spend the time recording or soldering?

An 8 channel snake has 48 solder points alone. When you start getting into patchbays and stuff then you are talking some serious time.

Whenever I have priced cable components vs ready made it seems like they almost give away the labor for free. When they buy 10,000 jacks at a time they can get a much better price then you can if you only need 16 of them. The markup you pay on the supplies is about what they pay in labor.