When I was completely broke, I made twisted-pair cables out of scrap single-core telephone wire. No shield. I just twisted the 2 wires together on my drill. I was stunned at how well this worked. In a Balanced system, the shield is just the icing on the cake for noise rejection.
Someone you might look at considering this method, is Dave Rat and his system. Saw a video where he ran a DMX light, an Aes and two analog lines in the same cable with no overhearing.
Actually it originated Dave Rats Sound Tools company. A little clarification with shielded cat5/6, yes it is cheaper than an ordinary multicore, but the cheaper cat cables are stiff and fragile as hell. In order to get a good cable you'll probably pay more than a multicore of four channels.
Great video! Wish more people were talking about this. For new studio builds this is the way to go. We did a recent build over the summer and while we did run a permanent db25 snake in the main room we prioritized network connections in every room because of the flexibility. There have been times we've needed hardwired internet in different rooms and this was no problem thanks to the connections. It's an all around win!
My University uses a Dante system with Rednets across all their studios. It's so cool because if there's a gig on in a different building, I can route the signal with Dante to record the performance through one of the desks in a completely different building
Keep in mind dante will add latency. Whether that’s important to you is up to you. This system isn’t converting to digital, it’s sending analog over the twisted pairs of the network cable.
Glen! First time commenting. Been watching for years though. But this video is so life saving that I had to finally break my silence! My online lesson room was giving me serious stress with all the cabling. THANK YOU!!!
And the best thing is that when it breaks because someone drops a cymbal on it, you can just buy a new CAT5 cable instead of having to buy an entire snake.
Or buy stronger Network cables, because every aspect of the Industry is full with computers, we need network cables everywhere. Because of that you can even find bulletproof network cables.
@@Toxicity1987 I wanna call that overkill, but I've met a lot of different people over the years who are either malicious, clumsy, or just plain stupid; some a combination of two or (grant me patience) all three.
I’m glad you reviewed this item. For my studio I built my own snake system for the drums using cat 6 Shielded twisted pair. I just connected a male XLR breakout box on one side and a female breakout box on the other side. The important thing to do is use shielded twisted pair and not regular twisted pair. Thanks so much for the video stay well
I actually made a breakout box for 8 channels in my room which spits out two shielded CAT5 cable. Makes cleanup much quicker to wrap up two cables rather than constantly tearing down the whole system. In the future I'll definitely run network cables across my whole house like he says here!
Nice shout on the Radial unit... great quality products and, as far as I know, all made in Canada. I ran a Cat 5 cable along with an XLR and a headphone cable from my iso booth to my mixer interface in my home studio. I probably should have just used a couple of these boxes and a single Ethernet cable. Live and learn.
So badass! I first worked with network audio at a venue. I was shocked at the low latency and how clean it was. I knew it was clearly the future. AVB, dante, this device, it's all the future. I feel like XLR is obsolete at this point.
@@SpectreSoundStudios oh for sure! but I was just saying how flexible network audio is in general. Why are we even still using XLR?!! at least in stereo mics and similar configs.
Hey Glenn we often use this stuff live in venues when we need a delay line or something and there is already networking in the room. Also works great if you need to distribute tomegode to a bunch of consoles. I custum build a series of boxes where you can chain them and select the channel you want to put out or in.
As long as it’s twisted pairs. I worked for a long time in network TV sports. As you can imagine a stadium has very long cable runs. In instances where we ran in to difficult situations the telephone guys would help us out. Often we sent audio hundreds of feet to the truck over phone wire. I always had some XLR to bare wire binding post adaptors in my bag. Worked just fine. Don’t be afraid of this.
I have had this exact system for a couple years now. I use it for broadcast TV Sports... I have had dynamic, condensers and comms running down it all at one time. It can also do AES. My cat5 shielded is 175' long. You can cleanly get away up to 330' before issues arrive. It's clean and no mixer ever realizes it's not mic pair copper. Very clean! Dave Rat has his own system available and his Cat cable really kicks butt! Individually shielded twisted pairs.
Wish I would have looked into this type of system around $1500.00 ago.... thank you for opening up a new world for me. I will keep all of my snakes for back up now. LoL again thank you and please keep up the outstanding videos. Sincerely, Pops Fitch
Great Video and timely. I am rewiring the studio and needed about a 50 foot run into another room for of all things...guitars! I went with the LyxPro boxes instead of the XLR cable version in your video. Same thing only with XLR boxes at both ends, one female, one male box instead of the cables and XLR plugs. Thanks for this much appreciated.
I use a pair of these for the sound system for my PA rental company. I probably have four or five full systems now and I plan on buying a whole lot more of them
The secret is out. I did a few 32 panels throughout a studio some 10+ years ago. I was a network engineer at the time and decided I wasn’t paying a premium for this stuff. If 1080hd and surround sound could go over network cables, then so can some simple audio signals. You can diy these easily, you don’t even have to pay attention to wiring diagrams. Just use the same colors and stick to it. Buy a a few hundred feet of cat5 or 6 and you’ll be set. Only thing I would maybe add additional is some shielding depending how noisy things are, but I’ve had luck running it as is. It’s really great to do quad cables into a single skinny cable. Even if you put 4 it’s still skinny. Like is said, I’ve done 32 (bundle of 8) and it worked out fine.
Do you mean add additional shielding for each quad cable? Or bundle a few quad cables together and then use some sort of nylon sleeve for extra protection when running behind walls?
You just solved how I'm going to run mic and headset audio out of my broadcast van! Way easier than using an expensive snake, and I can just keep a spool of CAT-6 and shielded ends in the van in case a cable breaks!
Low voltage electrician advice: those cheap boxes of shielded cable are alright but it is worth getting nicer cable, they tend to have custom twist rates that are higher and tend to perform better, and most importantly, they are more forgiving if you aren't the best at termination. My suggested brands are commscope, belden, and superior essex. Never had issues in the field with these brands. And if you know a guy in the industry, they might just grab some short runs of cable for you that were gonna get tossed.
Thanks for the tips, however, I was unable to source any of those brands here in South Carolina so I may resort to cat 6 shielded cable on Amazon… Risky buying from them or safe bet?
Kind of funny, the principal behind this goes back to TELCO audio long lines for radio stations going way back. I also built my own using 600-600 iso transformers as buildings I'm in have 3 phase 208 which can induce noise or hum. All the commercially made work great. mine needed to be rack mounted and not available commercially. Thanks for sharing. CAT6 shielded great for perm install. Haven't found a good Cat5 or 6 shielded that is flex especially in cold weather. Thanks for sharing.
These are very cool. I use something similar in film for our DMX lighting. New ethernet nodes work on Cat 5e cables and these little adapters integrate old DMX lights into that system. The whole Networked audio world is getting really cool and I'm glad to see more options like this in both fields.
I exclusively bake my own cables ...while barbecuing my fingers, most of the time. ;) When your mixer has 3 full patch-bays and 24 channel break out box to be connected, its hard to get anything 'off the shelve'... :P I still love my 20 y.o. A&H GS3000! :)
holy shit this is amazig. I actually have a proper cable home network with 16 cat6a wall outlets into a networking rack with a patch bay, so I can hook up things in one room into lan and directly patch it to the other room without going through a switch or a router.. clean solution for a signal. Now I can stream podcasts from my living room with the work being done in my studio, all the multicam switching and audio mixing without moving equipment around.. thank you Glenn for this amazing trick
Used it on long cable runs at line-level on a complicated festival setup, it worked flawless. I seriously have doubt at longer cables for mic level. Somebody should test that.
have you encountered any signal degradation with analog signals over twisted pair? I recall from my IT cabling days that the twists are engineered in a specific way that must be maintained to the point of termination and designed for digital transmissions.
Been using this in our PA for live gigs as well as recording in our (home) studio. I run 5 boxes - 3 to the back of the stage for drums and guitars, then 2 to the from but one is return for monitors and one for vocals. the 2 sets of CAT 6 cables in expanded sleeves to keep things neat.
Ive actually been doing this for my home audio with hs5's. accept I made the adapters myself and the cat5e in my walls isn't shielded so i can only do 3 channels of grounded audio or 4 underground for each wall jack. I don't hear any difference between this and running xlr straight to the speaker
If I remember correctly Cenzo Townshend's Decoy studios uses Ethernet cable extensively for audio. It is important to note there are some considerations for using ethernet cable. Glenn is demonstrating a system using Neutrik Ethercon (TM) based connectors and shielded cables. The quality of breakout systems varies. Ethernet cable has 8 conductors grouped into 4 pairs inside. Each pair is twisted together to limit “cross pair spectral contamination”. This makes it great for many applications. Cable manufacturing technology has advanced soo much over the last 20 years. Unshielded Ethernet cable is called UTP cable. To use ethernet cable for sending balanced signals, you have to use a pair of conductors for each balanced signal you are carrying. You can’t split your hot and cold for a single signal over multiple twisted pairs or you will have problems. So, what happens to the third pin also known as the ground you ask: If the system you are using is based on shielded ethernet cable (STP) you can run the grounds over the shield/drain system. This is what is being done with these Neutrik Ethercon (TM) based systems. So, if you count the cable shield/drain system you get a 9th conductor. Shielded Ethernet cable is a bit different from the regular non-shielded cable you probably have in the walls. We typically use shielded Ethernet cable for RF intense applications. If you use good break-out boxes and good connectors the ground pins are connected via the cable shield/drain system. This reduces noise by having the system use a common ground. Lower quality break out boxes “void” the ground. This is not ideal. Alternatively you can make your own snakes using unshielded cable while maintaining system ground integrity by stealing a pair to use for ground connections. This means you only get three balanced connections over one Ethernet cable, but it is still better than running three XLR cables. And, as Dr. Glenn pointed out: Ethernet cable is cheap. Another important note here is that most solid core cat5e -8 cable is designed for permanent installation which means that rolling it up and out many times will cause the conductors inside to break. The conductors inside of that type of cable are typically solid wire and don't like to bend often. Ethernet patch cables use stranded core wire and are more flexible but have some limitations, and shielded Ethernet patch cable (stranded) is a little harder to find. So, Ethernet snake systems with standard solid core ethernet wire work best for fixed snake installations like in studios and churches... or venues that stay setup. Also, one last thing: Not all of these system can be used to send phantom power. So if you have a thirsty mic that is looking for its fix of -48v you can't use some of these system without an extra piece of kit that injects phantom power at the far end. So in summary be careful as these Ethernet based snake systems aren’t using 100% garden variety ethernet, but are still really awesome.
Someone help me out. How is it that the snake condenses four mic cables to one and still end up with four separate mic channels in the end??? Thanks in advance‼️
A cat cable contains four twisted pairs of wires that are typically 23-24AWG. A mic line is a single pair of 22AWG wires that are typically very loosely twisted on low cost cables. The tightly twisted pairs of wires in the cat cable is superior when it comes to EMI/RFI rejection. If you have a radio station bleeding on your audio, you need to be using cabling like this, star quad, or RS-485 data grade cabling. And as Glenn mentioned elsewhere, you have to use shielded cat cable in order to get phantom power.
@@DBking773 yeah. each twisted pair of wires carries a channel. It's basically like having 4 mic cables wrapped up in a single sheath. Or half a DB25 cable.
If I ever get lucky and have a studio with a proper live room I'm going all in on the Cranborne Audio CAST system to get audio to the control room and headphone mixes to the live room. It's a no brainer!!
Glenn, this audio over cat5e/cat6 thing is something I looked into several months ago and I'm glad you made a video about this to remind me just how awesome it is! This is an amazing solution for those who are renting or cannot cut through walls for whatever reason but still need to route audio from one room to another. Not to mention if you are running this long distances you can save yourself a FUCK TON of cash by using ethernet instead of expensive XLR cables, and it's ALMOST easy enough for even a bass player to figure out.
I got some really unreliable Lyx systems like that a couple years back. Especially the Ethernet cable that came with it didn't withstand the test of wiggling and light kicking. I got the Radial ones next and never had issues. Plus, even though the Lyx work when they work, the wiring is messy. The way Radial does the wiring is clean and makes sense, very straightforward. You want good, consistent wiring in your snakes.
I've heard from the people who work on the road that they tend to break allot. Don't know, but it sure seems interesting and convenient since the quality of the wire that transfers the signal is the same as that in a regular audio cable.
Hey Glenn, have you tried connecting 3 microphones and 1 heaphones pair through this (with proper adapter for headphones of course). I'm wondering if 1 ethernet cable would work for pulling it into vocal cabin or additional small room for one person (mostly i'm concerned for ground loops, and eventually phantom power over cat5 hitting headphones). This maybe a stupid question, but it's better to ask, than "bassplayer" your gear during testing ;) Cheers.
Dunno why, but somehow this reminds Me of the times, when i was hauling around with a 16 ch multicable, soldering it all the time... and at any given time about 12 of the channels would be working.... Oh, and it weighted a TON
Thanks Glenn. I use that system in a live situation and it saves me a ton of time during pack-up! It seems that brand you bought is very similar to the Titan AV ones we get here in Queensland Australia, I’m very happy with them!
Great idea. Everybody can even DIY these things, if they have spare connectors and soldering iron lying around. Only concern would be crosstalk between those individual channels if each of 4 twisted pairs in Ethernet cable is not shielded individually (possible in case with dirt cheap cat5 cables), but probably balanced signal should take some care of that.
you can buy individually shielded Cat5e ( or Cat6 ) cables but form experience, there is no mesurable cross-talk between lines. take a look at Dave Rat ( Rat Sound ) he has some great video about this
This is a very interesting idea, but I’m puzzled by something: since a balanced cable has three leads but Ethernet cable has twisted pairs, does this mean the cold lead connects to nothing? I’m just curious.
It depends on what systems you use... delicious Ethernet cable has 8 conductors in 4 pairs inside. Each pair is twisted together to limit “cross pair spectral contamination”. To use Ethernet cable for balanced audio, You have to use a pair of conductors for each balanced signal you are carrying. You can’t split your hot and cold for a single signal over multiple twisted pairs or you will have problems. So, to answer your question what happens to the third pin also known as the ground: If the system you are using is based on shielded cat5e -8 you can run the grounds over the shield/drain system. This is what is done with these Neutrik Ethercon (TM) based systems. So if you count the cable shield/drain system you get a 9th conductor. Shielded Ethernet cable is a bit different from the regular non shielded cable you probably have in the walls. We typically use shielded ethernet for RF intense applications. If you use good break-out boxes and good connectors the ground pins are connected via the cable shield. This additionally reduces noise by having the systems use a common ground. Lower quality break out boxes “void” the ground. This is not ideal. Alternatively you can make your own snakes using unshielded cable while maintaining system ground integrity by stealing a pair to use for ground connections. This means you only get three balanced connections over one Ethernet cable, but it is still better than running three XLR cables. Another important note here is that most cat5e -8 cable is designed for permanent installation which means that rolling it up and out many times will cause the conductors inside to break. The conductors inside are typically solid core wire. Ethernet patch cables use stranded core wire and are more flexible but have more limitations, and shielded Ethernet patch cable is not exactly standard. Ethernet snake systems with standard Ethernet wire work best for fixed snake installations like in studios and churches... or venues that stay setup. Also, you can't always send phantom power over these rigs. You have to inject it at the far end.
Great concept! It'd be interesting to see if the different twist ratios change attenuation enough to see a difference in the audio coming back for each channel. I'd love to see a side by side of the same audio source across each channel on those breakouts to see if it makes any difference.
Hi Glen. Thanks for all the help. You mentioned HDMI over Ethernet for additional applications you will be doing. I just got a new 8 channel video switcher for shooting bands live and something like this product for HDMI/Video would be perfect for wrangling cameras together in the way you are doing with audio inputs here. Do you already know of a product that does the same thing that this product is does but with HDMI? That would be very helpful if you do. Most Appreciated!
I considered to buy Radial Catapult (max quality) or DIY (max cheap ass), but ended up ordering the sssnake cause it was so cheap. Great infotainment as usual.👉🏻👌🏻
@@anthonydallarosa8314 The so called complex impedance, caused by capacitance and/or inductance. It might compromise the higher frequencies. Square waves can reveal a lot, as they consist of all uneven harmonics. Edit: I don't expect too much distortion, as those cables are capable of carrying waves of hundreds of MHz. 😉
I looked into setting up a Dante system in my home, and HOO BOY is that stuff expensive! I don't know what kind of licensing fee Audinate charges for companies to use their tech, but it must be huge. I like the looks of AVB as well, but I couldn't find the right AVB solution for me. I ended up ponying up for the optical MADI card for my UFX+ and getting a 12Mic and a really long optical cable to get 12 channels anywhere in the house where I'm willing to string the cable.
If you are so inclined, you can make these boxes from Neutrik D panel connectors and guitar pedal enclosures. You can make them for both XLR and TRS that way. I'm not sure how it works out in terms of USD per breakout pair though.
Been looking at that system for awhile now. I did live capture when we actually could go to live venues. I like the Idea to clean and simplify the stage area. Being an old engineer, I still would like to see some test data, I come from the era of "everything has to be shielded." Because your are sending analog signals over that digital cable, the distributed capacitance might be an issue over longer runs. I doubt that it would be an issue over studio length runs. Hey, I'm old school, I started in the biz in the '70's [yea, ancient history] I like specs, even if they are just a bit optimistic...
one of the best things about cat6 is just you have a known quantity, if you have some soldering skill, you could do xlr over hdmi, that could give, if my math is right 9+ cables off one cable, there are quite a few things I have seen in recent years that use hdmi cables as connectors but not for video.
Glenn! How do you work it out if you're recording two guitarists and one insists on having a different tone to the other? For example, one wants a really scooped tone and the other wants a very trebley type tone. Would you prefer all guitar tracks had the same tone or do you encourage different guitar tones on the same song?
Hi, I’m not Glenn, but from my own experience, the guitar tones should differ at least a little bit so they can both be heard in the mix. They might start to meld together in kind of a muddy way if they have the same exact tone.
@@logurtboi5702 Thanks for the response. I've previously been doing it that way but on listening to CDs of bands like Madball, early Metallica etc. the tone seems to be consistent across the board.
Would that network snake work say if I wanted to run a analog mackie sound board to a digital snake box that has the main speaker system connected to the digital snake.
I use one of these to send a couple signals from my tech desk to my XR18 on stage as I need to send a Talkback mic and PC audio TO the mixer and receive an Aux out (for broadcast) and the headphones output FROM the mixer. Since my mixer basically acts as a stagebox it means I don't have to run a a big multicore and only this Cat6 snake for the few things I need. I created a 30m 3 channel Cat6 Cable reel using Expandable Braided Sleeving, 3 Shielded Cat6 cables and a Cable reel, as besides the Cat6 Audio Snake, I need to run another feed for the "Remote" output and another for a Cat6 USB extender to I can multitrack record from the tech desk (instead of having a laptop on stage)
Great video thanks. - Quick question - a stage box can have say 24 sends to the FOH and I suppose FOH could send a large number back to the stage box, ALL up and down a single cat5/6 cable. How come these are restricted to 4 ? Peter.
I’ve had mixed results running video over network cable, short runs are fine but longer runs are hit and miss. Probably less of an issue in the studio (my experience is in a performing arts venue), but figured it was worth throwing my experience out there. SDI is still king for me (and doesn’t cost much more than HDMI-over-Cat solutions).
I am wondering if that might be useful for connecting a pedal board to an amp via 4 cable method. 4 inputs is exactly what you need there (3x audio, 1x footswitch). Not sure if the thin leads of a cat 5 have a low enough resistance to not mess up an instrument level signal. It would be so much simpler to put one box under the board and screw/tape the other side to the back of the amp and just run ethernet between them. A short cable for practice and a longer one for shows. Common enough so that you're not screwed if it breaks.
Hey Glenn, I got the have the Thomann SSSnake cat6 snakes. The one thing I found out was that you need a shielded cat6 in order to send phantom power to your mics and you have to be careful with ribbon mics with these snakes since the XLR's on these snakes share the same ground. Love the review!
Ethernet cable is 100 ohm twisted pairs, and audio systems are usually 150 or 600 ohm, so there is a possibility of signal degradation from standing waves for very long runs (1km+), but I don't think that will be an issue for in studio use. It would be interesting to see what the cross talk between the channels looks like though, because the pairs are not individually shielded. But since everything is twisted, most of that will probably be common mode and drop out. Seems like a real good idea to me.
Id like to clean up the stage using this LYX system for live gigs. My question is, you would have 4 XLR inputs going into the box and 1 cat 5 cable (with XLR connector) going back to mixer. How do I separate the channels back at the mixer since I only have 1 connector? Confused.
@@therealjackfisher Then you have a faulty product, Cat 7 and 8 Wires work just fine with every network connection, that all is at its core the same cable, just with better shielding. Except of course you got a real Cat 7 cable with Cat 7 Compliant connections, RJ45 isn't compliant with Cat7. RJ45 was updated to be compliant with Cat 8 so there that.
The one thing that always bugged me is all the cables I gotta use when doing live shows. This wouldn't remove all the clutter and via color coding, would both speed up things. I can use shorter cables and likely speed things up a little bit. I'd rather tack down a few Cat5E's than a big sub-snake cable or lots of mic cables. I would recommend just going with STP cabling(pre-made is fine), stock up on some EtherCons and a crimping tool if you want to make your own cables.
Always top vids with Glenn. Are all these manufacturers systems interchangable with each other? I have a few of the Ward Beck boxes but missed out on the their 25 pin adaptors. Hoping I can use maybe a Lyx with a Ward Beck. Cheers.
If you're running say 4 (or more of these units) what's the best way to get multiple Cat-5 cables into your DAW? How do you terminate/combine them all on the computer end to combine 4 (or more) of these. Thanks. Phil NYC Area
Wondering if this would be suitable to run 9v up to a guitar to power onboard effects? Spoken recently to someone developing a 6mm TRRS jack about this but an ethernet cable may be the more cost effective way. Also running a Noatronic onboard expression, acoustic piezo signal and standard jack in addition to a Roland pickup, second separate Hexaphonic pickup and XY midi controller so looking to cut down and not have 5 million plugs into/out of the guitar!
For a pure digital system Audinates Dante it the way to go for simplicity but there maybe trade offs for scaling, interoperability and sampling/quality where you may want to use AES67 depending on your requirements. AVB is more expensive where you require network switches that support the time sync component of the standard. In devices in this video are purely a Analog device.
Something to consider if there are musicians in your studio is that network cables, especially shielded higher category ones, are significantly more fragile and stiff than your usual mic cables.
you can find Cat 6 in solid core or stranded. The solid core is a pain anyway, good for fixed installations, but i wouldn't use it for a cable snake that will be moved and bumped constantly.
Hey glen do they sell the just xlr end that plugs into the box? It would be great it you can buy some shielded CAT5e or CAT6 cable and make custom length runs.
man i came back to this chsnnel after 2 years and am pretty surprised! good on ya for losing so much weight!
Thanks man! I feel SO MUCH better! Welcome back, btw!
@@SpectreSoundStudios good channel 100%
When I was completely broke, I made twisted-pair cables out of scrap single-core telephone wire. No shield. I just twisted the 2 wires together on my drill.
I was stunned at how well this worked. In a Balanced system, the shield is just the icing on the cake for noise rejection.
Someone you might look at considering this method, is Dave Rat and his system.
Saw a video where he ran a DMX light, an Aes and two analog lines in the same cable with no overhearing.
That he could measure...
Dave know his stuff for sure !
I use the Radial version to run 8 channels of AES3 down a single cable, that’s two channels for the price of one 🤣
These cat5 audio boxes have been around for a while but Dave Rat was the first I can think of who made a good quality commercial product
Actually it originated Dave Rats Sound Tools company. A little clarification with shielded cat5/6, yes it is cheaper than an ordinary multicore, but the cheaper cat cables are stiff and fragile as hell. In order to get a good cable you'll probably pay more than a multicore of four channels.
Great video! Wish more people were talking about this. For new studio builds this is the way to go. We did a recent build over the summer and while we did run a permanent db25 snake in the main room we prioritized network connections in every room because of the flexibility. There have been times we've needed hardwired internet in different rooms and this was no problem thanks to the connections. It's an all around win!
My University uses a Dante system with Rednets across all their studios. It's so cool because if there's a gig on in a different building, I can route the signal with Dante to record the performance through one of the desks in a completely different building
Keep in mind dante will add latency. Whether that’s important to you is up to you. This system isn’t converting to digital, it’s sending analog over the twisted pairs of the network cable.
We do that at my uni, too! However that's completely different from this, since this is entirely analog.
This is awesome ,I got a bunch of cat 5 cables everywhere here ,good to see another use for them
Get Cat5E with the shield, otherwise no phantom power
Building a new studio this year? AWESOME!!! Greetings from Córdoba, Argentina.
Glen! First time commenting. Been watching for years though. But this video is so life saving that I had to finally break my silence! My online lesson room was giving me serious stress with all the cabling. THANK YOU!!!
I turned onto this method via the behringer x32 system and associated stage boxes. its so much easier running a couple network over a mammoth xlr reel
Hey Bob! Thanks for sharing... I didn't even consider how this would make live sound considerably easier! That's awesome it's working out for you!
@@SpectreSoundStudios allen and heath do a similar thing, as do Midas. it works brilliantly fully recommend it
The fact I was literally looking for this exact kind of product 6 hours ago is some beautiful coincidence. Gonna order a pair! Thanks, Glenn.
And the best thing is that when it breaks because someone drops a cymbal on it, you can just buy a new CAT5 cable instead of having to buy an entire snake.
There’s that, too!
Now who'd drop a cymbal... right the bassist.
Or buy stronger Network cables, because every aspect of the Industry is full with computers, we need network cables everywhere.
Because of that you can even find bulletproof network cables.
@@Toxicity1987 I wanna call that overkill, but I've met a lot of different people over the years who are either malicious, clumsy, or just plain stupid; some a combination of two or (grant me patience) all three.
OK I've seen a lot of stupid shit happen, but I haven't seen this one yet.
Please tell me theres a good story with that.
I’m glad you reviewed this item. For my studio I built my own snake system for the drums using cat 6 Shielded twisted pair. I just connected a male XLR breakout box on one side and a female breakout box on the other side. The important thing to do is use shielded twisted pair and not regular twisted pair. Thanks so much for the video stay well
I actually made a breakout box for 8 channels in my room which spits out two shielded CAT5 cable. Makes cleanup much quicker to wrap up two cables rather than constantly tearing down the whole system. In the future I'll definitely run network cables across my whole house like he says here!
I am always all for cable clean organisation! I have cable wrappers everywhere :) and that track is sick
Yeah, really looking forward to cleaning up my drum room!
Nice shout on the Radial unit... great quality products and, as far as I know, all made in Canada. I ran a Cat 5 cable along with an XLR and a headphone cable from my iso booth to my mixer interface in my home studio. I probably should have just used a couple of these boxes and a single Ethernet cable. Live and learn.
So badass! I first worked with network audio at a venue. I was shocked at the low latency and how clean it was. I knew it was clearly the future. AVB, dante, this device, it's all the future. I feel like XLR is obsolete at this point.
This isn’t digital. No latency at all. Not networked. Analog.
@@SpectreSoundStudios oh for sure! but I was just saying how flexible network audio is in general. Why are we even still using XLR?!! at least in stereo mics and similar configs.
One of my friend used CAT5 cables when wiring up some studio once he ran out of the XLR cable. Legend says the owner still doesn't know about it.
Hey Glenn we often use this stuff live in venues when we need a delay line or something and there is already networking in the room.
Also works great if you need to distribute tomegode to a bunch of consoles.
I custum build a series of boxes where you can chain them and select the channel you want to put out or in.
As long as it’s twisted pairs.
I worked for a long time in network TV sports. As you can imagine a stadium has very long cable runs. In instances where we ran in to difficult situations the telephone guys would help us out. Often we sent audio hundreds of feet to the truck over phone wire. I always had some XLR to bare wire binding post adaptors in my bag. Worked just fine. Don’t be afraid of this.
Please please PLEASE show us the process of building the new studio!
You got it!
I have had this exact system for a couple years now. I use it for broadcast TV Sports... I have had dynamic, condensers and comms running down it all at one time. It can also do AES. My cat5 shielded is 175' long. You can cleanly get away up to 330' before issues arrive. It's clean and no mixer ever realizes it's not mic pair copper. Very clean! Dave Rat has his own system available and his Cat cable really kicks butt! Individually shielded twisted pairs.
phantom power?
Wish I would have looked into this type of system around $1500.00 ago.... thank you for opening up a new world for me. I will keep all of my snakes for back up now. LoL again thank you and please keep up the outstanding videos. Sincerely, Pops Fitch
Happy to help!
Great Video and timely. I am rewiring the studio and needed about a 50 foot run into another room for of all things...guitars! I went with the LyxPro boxes instead of the XLR cable version in your video. Same thing only with XLR boxes at both ends, one female, one male box instead of the cables and XLR plugs. Thanks for this much appreciated.
GLENNN!!!! Did you ever do a follow up on that studio build process? I looked into the video's but couldn't find it. Thanks!
I use a pair of these for the sound system for my PA rental company.
I probably have four or five full systems now and I plan on buying a whole lot more of them
The secret is out. I did a few 32 panels throughout a studio some 10+ years ago. I was a network engineer at the time and decided I wasn’t paying a premium for this stuff. If 1080hd and surround sound could go over network cables, then so can some simple audio signals. You can diy these easily, you don’t even have to pay attention to wiring diagrams. Just use the same colors and stick to it. Buy a a few hundred feet of cat5 or 6 and you’ll be set. Only thing I would maybe add additional is some shielding depending how noisy things are, but I’ve had luck running it as is. It’s really great to do quad cables into a single skinny cable. Even if you put 4 it’s still skinny. Like is said, I’ve done 32 (bundle of 8) and it worked out fine.
Do you mean add additional shielding for each quad cable? Or bundle a few quad cables together and then use some sort of nylon sleeve for extra protection when running behind walls?
You just solved how I'm going to run mic and headset audio out of my broadcast van! Way easier than using an expensive snake, and I can just keep a spool of CAT-6 and shielded ends in the van in case a cable breaks!
Low voltage electrician advice: those cheap boxes of shielded cable are alright but it is worth getting nicer cable, they tend to have custom twist rates that are higher and tend to perform better, and most importantly, they are more forgiving if you aren't the best at termination.
My suggested brands are commscope, belden, and superior essex. Never had issues in the field with these brands. And if you know a guy in the industry, they might just grab some short runs of cable for you that were gonna get tossed.
Thanks for the tips, however, I was unable to source any of those brands here in South Carolina so I may resort to cat 6 shielded cable on Amazon…
Risky buying from them or safe bet?
Kind of funny, the principal behind this goes back to TELCO audio long lines for radio stations going way back. I also built my own using 600-600 iso transformers as buildings I'm in have 3 phase 208 which can induce noise or hum. All the commercially made work great. mine needed to be rack mounted and not available commercially. Thanks for sharing. CAT6 shielded great for perm install. Haven't found a good Cat5 or 6 shielded that is flex especially in cold weather. Thanks for sharing.
These are very cool. I use something similar in film for our DMX lighting. New ethernet nodes work on Cat 5e cables and these little adapters integrate old DMX lights into that system. The whole Networked audio world is getting really cool and I'm glad to see more options like this in both fields.
I exclusively bake my own cables ...while barbecuing my fingers, most of the time. ;)
When your mixer has 3 full patch-bays and 24 channel break out box to be connected, its hard to get anything 'off the shelve'... :P I still love my 20 y.o. A&H GS3000! :)
Thanks for this Glen, you've got me rethinking my wiring layout for my next studio build. Cheers!
holy shit this is amazig. I actually have a proper cable home network with 16 cat6a wall outlets into a networking rack with a patch bay, so I can hook up things in one room into lan and directly patch it to the other room without going through a switch or a router.. clean solution for a signal. Now I can stream podcasts from my living room with the work being done in my studio, all the multicam switching and audio mixing without moving equipment around.. thank you Glenn for this amazing trick
Enjoy!
Used it on long cable runs at line-level on a complicated festival setup, it worked flawless.
I seriously have doubt at longer cables for mic level. Somebody should test that.
Dave Rats KINDA done it - but just informally ua-cam.com/video/f0nKK43Oeas/v-deo.html
have you encountered any signal degradation with analog signals over twisted pair? I recall from my IT cabling days that the twists are engineered in a specific way that must be maintained to the point of termination and designed for digital transmissions.
Been using this in our PA for live gigs as well as recording in our (home) studio. I run 5 boxes - 3 to the back of the stage for drums and guitars, then 2 to the from but one is return for monitors and one for vocals. the 2 sets of CAT 6 cables in expanded sleeves to keep things neat.
Ive actually been doing this for my home audio with hs5's. accept I made the adapters myself and the cat5e in my walls isn't shielded so i can only do 3 channels of grounded audio or 4 underground for each wall jack. I don't hear any difference between this and running xlr straight to the speaker
Dave Rat at RatSound/ Soundtools makes awesome CAT snakes as well, great quality for stage and studio!
And a beautiful red color
If I remember correctly Cenzo Townshend's Decoy studios uses Ethernet cable extensively for audio. It is important to note there are some considerations for using ethernet cable. Glenn is demonstrating a system using Neutrik Ethercon (TM) based connectors and shielded cables. The quality of breakout systems varies.
Ethernet cable has 8 conductors grouped into 4 pairs inside. Each pair is twisted together to limit “cross pair spectral contamination”. This makes it great for many applications. Cable manufacturing technology has advanced soo much over the last 20 years.
Unshielded Ethernet cable is called UTP cable. To use ethernet cable for sending balanced signals, you have to use a pair of conductors for each balanced signal you are carrying. You can’t split your hot and cold for a single signal over multiple twisted pairs or you will have problems. So, what happens to the third pin also known as the ground you ask: If the system you are using is based on shielded ethernet cable (STP) you can run the grounds over the shield/drain system. This is what is being done with these Neutrik Ethercon (TM) based systems. So, if you count the cable shield/drain system you get a 9th conductor.
Shielded Ethernet cable is a bit different from the regular non-shielded cable you probably have in the walls. We typically use shielded Ethernet cable for RF intense applications. If you use good break-out boxes and good connectors the ground pins are connected via the cable shield/drain system. This reduces noise by having the system use a common ground. Lower quality break out boxes “void” the ground. This is not ideal.
Alternatively you can make your own snakes using unshielded cable while maintaining system ground integrity by stealing a pair to use for ground connections. This means you only get three balanced connections over one Ethernet cable, but it is still better than running three XLR cables. And, as Dr. Glenn pointed out: Ethernet cable is cheap.
Another important note here is that most solid core cat5e -8 cable is designed for permanent installation which means that rolling it up and out many times will cause the conductors inside to break. The conductors inside of that type of cable are typically solid wire and don't like to bend often. Ethernet patch cables use stranded core wire and are more flexible but have some limitations, and shielded Ethernet patch cable (stranded) is a little harder to find. So, Ethernet snake systems with standard solid core ethernet wire work best for fixed snake installations like in studios and churches... or venues that stay setup.
Also, one last thing: Not all of these system can be used to send phantom power. So if you have a thirsty mic that is looking for its fix of -48v you can't use some of these system without an extra piece of kit that injects phantom power at the far end.
So in summary be careful as these Ethernet based snake systems aren’t using 100% garden variety ethernet, but are still really awesome.
As long as it’s shielded, it’ll handle phantom
Someone help me out. How is it that the snake condenses four mic cables to one and still end up with four separate mic channels in the end??? Thanks in advance‼️
There are 8 individual wires (4 pairs) inside a cat cable
@@theauntiewarhol so basically that one cable carries the four channels on its own similar to a db 25 cable?
A cat cable contains four twisted pairs of wires that are typically 23-24AWG. A mic line is a single pair of 22AWG wires that are typically very loosely twisted on low cost cables. The tightly twisted pairs of wires in the cat cable is superior when it comes to EMI/RFI rejection. If you have a radio station bleeding on your audio, you need to be using cabling like this, star quad, or RS-485 data grade cabling.
And as Glenn mentioned elsewhere, you have to use shielded cat cable in order to get phantom power.
@@DBking773 yeah. each twisted pair of wires carries a channel. It's basically like having 4 mic cables wrapped up in a single sheath. Or half a DB25 cable.
Thnx for this tip man!, I need this for my home studio and it would be great for the rehearsal room as well, no more black spaghetti everywhere!
If I ever get lucky and have a studio with a proper live room I'm going all in on the Cranborne Audio CAST system to get audio to the control room and headphone mixes to the live room. It's a no brainer!!
Can phantom power be used from mixer board ?
Glenn, this audio over cat5e/cat6 thing is something I looked into several months ago and I'm glad you made a video about this to remind me just how awesome it is! This is an amazing solution for those who are renting or cannot cut through walls for whatever reason but still need to route audio from one room to another. Not to mention if you are running this long distances you can save yourself a FUCK TON of cash by using ethernet instead of expensive XLR cables, and it's ALMOST easy enough for even a bass player to figure out.
Almost.
@@SpectreSoundStudios does this preserve balanced nature of the signal?
Hello, one Question, if you have 4 xlr in to only 1 out, the system recognize that there are 4 separate inputs, and how is the setup in Reaper?
Male/female breakout at either end.
I think he got 2 of those system, one with XLR Male and the other one with XLR Female. Then, he connect the two systems with the CAT5 Cable.
this is not a network device.
this is 100% analog cables using a cat5e cables for the long run.
Almost all of my mic cables are LyxPro. Great brand & value. Thanks for the heads up Glenn!
Last time I was this early Mustaine wasn't with Gibson.
Last time I was this early Mustaine was in Metallica
Wonder if Steve will start playing Firebird basses or stick with the JACKSON 🤘🏽🤘🏽🤘🏽
I got some really unreliable Lyx systems like that a couple years back. Especially the Ethernet cable that came with it didn't withstand the test of wiggling and light kicking. I got the Radial ones next and never had issues. Plus, even though the Lyx work when they work, the wiring is messy. The way Radial does the wiring is clean and makes sense, very straightforward. You want good, consistent wiring in your snakes.
I use these all the time in my studio but also bring them with me whenever I have a event at a large venue to remove clutter.
I've heard from the people who work on the road that they tend to break allot. Don't know, but it sure seems interesting and convenient since the quality of the wire that transfers the signal is the same as that in a regular audio cable.
Hey Glenn, have you tried connecting 3 microphones and 1 heaphones pair through this (with proper adapter for headphones of course). I'm wondering if 1 ethernet cable would work for pulling it into vocal cabin or additional small room for one person (mostly i'm concerned for ground loops, and eventually phantom power over cat5 hitting headphones). This maybe a stupid question, but it's better to ask, than "bassplayer" your gear during testing ;) Cheers.
This might be a sumb question, but how do you get the audio from the cat5 cable in to the interface? Another breakout box?
I was curious about this as well! I also wondered if some audio interfaces have Ethernet ports on them!
I think Sound Tools from Dave Rat were the first to implement it. They make very cool wallmount stuff to. A little bit more expensive though
Thanks for the great gear tips you keep putting out!
Dunno why, but somehow this reminds Me of the times, when i was hauling around with a 16 ch multicable, soldering it all the time... and at any given time about 12 of the channels would be working.... Oh, and it weighted a TON
Thanks Glenn. I use that system in a live situation and it saves me a ton of time during pack-up! It seems that brand you bought is very similar to the Titan AV ones we get here in Queensland Australia, I’m very happy with them!
Great idea. Everybody can even DIY these things, if they have spare connectors and soldering iron lying around. Only concern would be crosstalk between those individual channels if each of 4 twisted pairs in Ethernet cable is not shielded individually (possible in case with dirt cheap cat5 cables), but probably balanced signal should take some care of that.
you can buy individually shielded Cat5e ( or Cat6 ) cables but form experience, there is no mesurable cross-talk between lines.
take a look at Dave Rat ( Rat Sound ) he has some great video about this
Hi Gleen! Can't wait for that Lindell Audio 500 series video! Cheers from Colombia :D
Seems a great product but how do you hook it into your audio interface? Dumb question but I feel I'm missing something obvious
Me too.
Oh I get it now. It's 2 boxes. One female and one male. the cat5 goes between the two. I'm awake now.
This is a very interesting idea, but I’m puzzled by something: since a balanced cable has three leads but Ethernet cable has twisted pairs, does this mean the cold lead connects to nothing? I’m just curious.
It depends on what systems you use... delicious Ethernet cable has 8 conductors in 4 pairs inside. Each pair is twisted together to limit “cross pair spectral contamination”.
To use Ethernet cable for balanced audio, You have to use a pair of conductors for each balanced signal you are carrying. You can’t split your hot and cold for a single signal over multiple twisted pairs or you will have problems. So, to answer your question what happens to the third pin also known as the ground: If the system you are using is based on shielded cat5e -8 you can run the grounds over the shield/drain system. This is what is done with these Neutrik Ethercon (TM) based systems. So if you count the cable shield/drain system you get a 9th conductor.
Shielded Ethernet cable is a bit different from the regular non shielded cable you probably have in the walls. We typically use shielded ethernet for RF intense applications. If you use good break-out boxes and good connectors the ground pins are connected via the cable shield. This additionally reduces noise by having the systems use a common ground. Lower quality break out boxes “void” the ground. This is not ideal. Alternatively you can make your own snakes using unshielded cable while maintaining system ground integrity by stealing a pair to use for ground connections. This means you only get three balanced connections over one Ethernet cable, but it is still better than running three XLR cables. Another important note here is that most cat5e -8 cable is designed for permanent installation which means that rolling it up and out many times will cause the conductors inside to break. The conductors inside are typically solid core wire. Ethernet patch cables use stranded core wire and are more flexible but have more limitations, and shielded Ethernet patch cable is not exactly standard. Ethernet snake systems with standard Ethernet wire work best for fixed snake installations like in studios and churches... or venues that stay setup. Also, you can't always send phantom power over these rigs. You have to inject it at the far end.
@@joed3483 Very interesting and thanks for the info! so the ground runs on the shielding. that makes sense.
Great concept! It'd be interesting to see if the different twist ratios change attenuation enough to see a difference in the audio coming back for each channel. I'd love to see a side by side of the same audio source across each channel on those breakouts to see if it makes any difference.
Hi Glen. Thanks for all the help. You mentioned HDMI over Ethernet for additional applications you will be doing. I just got a new 8 channel video switcher for shooting bands live and something like this product for HDMI/Video would be perfect for wrangling cameras together in the way you are doing with audio inputs here. Do you already know of a product that does the same thing that this product is does but with HDMI? That would be very helpful if you do. Most Appreciated!
I considered to buy Radial Catapult (max quality) or DIY (max cheap ass), but ended up ordering the sssnake cause it was so cheap.
Great infotainment as usual.👉🏻👌🏻
I bought my first bass from Thomann back in January and it made it to me in the US with no problem. Must be a Canada thing
Would be great to have this system tested with a signal generator, monitoring input and output of several waveforms over the audio frequency spectrum.
Right? I’m interested in how the impedance is affected by the cat 6 cables
@@anthonydallarosa8314 The so called complex impedance, caused by capacitance and/or inductance. It might compromise the higher frequencies. Square waves can reveal a lot, as they consist of all uneven harmonics.
Edit: I don't expect too much distortion, as those cables are capable of carrying waves of hundreds of MHz. 😉
go take a look at dave rat. he was the first person i know that made these audio over cat boxes. really great guy!
@@nathanjames1981 Thanks Nathan, great tip! There's a lot to be seen on Dave Rat's channel! 😊
I looked into setting up a Dante system in my home, and HOO BOY is that stuff expensive! I don't know what kind of licensing fee Audinate charges for companies to use their tech, but it must be huge. I like the looks of AVB as well, but I couldn't find the right AVB solution for me. I ended up ponying up for the optical MADI card for my UFX+ and getting a 12Mic and a really long optical cable to get 12 channels anywhere in the house where I'm willing to string the cable.
This is really cool, and just what I needed. Thanks!
If you are so inclined, you can make these boxes from Neutrik D panel connectors and guitar pedal enclosures. You can make them for both XLR and TRS that way. I'm not sure how it works out in terms of USD per breakout pair though.
Just grabbed a pair to put in my ISO box, 1 CAT-6 cable is a lot better then 3 XLR leads. Thanks Glen
Been looking at that system for awhile now. I did live capture when we actually could go to live venues. I like the Idea to clean and simplify the stage area. Being an old engineer, I still would like to see some test data, I come from the era of "everything has to be shielded." Because your are sending analog signals over that digital cable, the distributed capacitance might be an issue over longer runs. I doubt that it would be an issue over studio length runs. Hey, I'm old school, I started in the biz in the '70's [yea, ancient history] I like specs, even if they are just a bit optimistic...
I’m using shielded cat5e.
one of the best things about cat6 is just you have a known quantity, if you have some soldering skill, you could do xlr over hdmi, that could give, if my math is right 9+ cables off one cable, there are quite a few things I have seen in recent years that use hdmi cables as connectors but not for video.
I will keep this in mind for when I eventually get around to building my jam room
Wow this is awesome!! Thanks so much for sharing. I’m going to order some right now!!
Glenn! How do you work it out if you're recording two guitarists and one insists on having a different tone to the other? For example, one wants a really scooped tone and the other wants a very trebley type tone. Would you prefer all guitar tracks had the same tone or do you encourage different guitar tones on the same song?
Hi, I’m not Glenn, but from my own experience, the guitar tones should differ at least a little bit so they can both be heard in the mix. They might start to meld together in kind of a muddy way if they have the same exact tone.
@@logurtboi5702 +1
@@logurtboi5702 Thanks for the response. I've previously been doing it that way but on listening to CDs of bands like Madball, early Metallica etc. the tone seems to be consistent across the board.
Excellent question. Been wondering this myself.
you actually WANT the two guitar to sound different. this gives a better stereo field and bigger sound
Would that network snake work say if I wanted to run a analog mackie sound board to a digital snake box that has the main speaker system connected to the digital snake.
I use one of these to send a couple signals from my tech desk to my XR18 on stage as I need to send a Talkback mic and PC audio TO the mixer and receive an Aux out (for broadcast) and the headphones output FROM the mixer. Since my mixer basically acts as a stagebox it means I don't have to run a a big multicore and only this Cat6 snake for the few things I need.
I created a 30m 3 channel Cat6 Cable reel using Expandable Braided Sleeving, 3 Shielded Cat6 cables and a Cable reel, as besides the Cat6 Audio Snake, I need to run another feed for the "Remote" output and another for a Cat6 USB extender to I can multitrack record from the tech desk (instead of having a laptop on stage)
Great video thanks. - Quick question - a stage box can have say 24 sends to the FOH and I suppose FOH could send a large number back to the stage box, ALL up and down a single cat5/6 cable. How come these are restricted to 4 ? Peter.
What if you plug a condenser on channel 1 and a ribbon on channel 2? Doesn't shared 48v wire blow the ribbon mic?
Fantastic stuff! Thanks man! 🤘🔥👏👏
DUDE. I've just signed the lease for my new apartment and I find out the ethernet ports are all hooked to a patchbay.
No need to install ANYTHING!
I’ve had mixed results running video over network cable, short runs are fine but longer runs are hit and miss.
Probably less of an issue in the studio (my experience is in a performing arts venue), but figured it was worth throwing my experience out there. SDI is still king for me (and doesn’t cost much more than HDMI-over-Cat solutions).
Were you using NDI or something else? The former looks really promising for video-over-IP
I am wondering if that might be useful for connecting a pedal board to an amp via 4 cable method. 4 inputs is exactly what you need there (3x audio, 1x footswitch). Not sure if the thin leads of a cat 5 have a low enough resistance to not mess up an instrument level signal. It would be so much simpler to put one box under the board and screw/tape the other side to the back of the amp and just run ethernet between them. A short cable for practice and a longer one for shows. Common enough so that you're not screwed if it breaks.
Very much looking forward to a new studio build! Staying in Windsor?
Hey Glenn, I got the have the Thomann SSSnake cat6 snakes. The one thing I found out was that you need a shielded cat6 in order to send phantom power to your mics and you have to be careful with ribbon mics with these snakes since the XLR's on these snakes share the same ground. Love the review!
Yes. Mentioned that in very clear black and white text in the video.
Ethernet cable is 100 ohm twisted pairs, and audio systems are usually 150 or 600 ohm, so there is a possibility of signal degradation from standing waves for very long runs (1km+), but I don't think that will be an issue for in studio use. It would be interesting to see what the cross talk between the channels looks like though, because the pairs are not individually shielded. But since everything is twisted, most of that will probably be common mode and drop out. Seems like a real good idea to me.
Id like to clean up the stage using this LYX system for live gigs. My question is, you would have 4 XLR inputs going into the box and 1 cat 5 cable (with XLR connector) going back to mixer. How do I separate the channels back at the mixer since I only have 1 connector? Confused.
Aaaaannnd now cat-5 cables are going to cost 5x more, and sell as "professional audio cables".
Monster cable announces new oxygen free triple shielded cat 6 audiophile grade cables, only 1.29per foot. 🤣
Cat5e is « old technologies « don’t worry about that
Then just buy Cat6 or Cat7/8 Cables, they are all dirt cheap.
@@Toxicity1987 7/8 wont work.. I have one and its completely different cable. It wont even talk to my router.
@@therealjackfisher Then you have a faulty product, Cat 7 and 8 Wires work just fine with every network connection, that all is at its core the same cable, just with better shielding. Except of course you got a real Cat 7 cable with Cat 7 Compliant connections, RJ45 isn't compliant with Cat7. RJ45 was updated to be compliant with Cat 8 so there that.
The one thing that always bugged me is all the cables I gotta use when doing live shows. This wouldn't remove all the clutter and via color coding, would both speed up things. I can use shorter cables and likely speed things up a little bit. I'd rather tack down a few Cat5E's than a big sub-snake cable or lots of mic cables. I would recommend just going with STP cabling(pre-made is fine), stock up on some EtherCons and a crimping tool if you want to make your own cables.
Very informative and concise! Thanks.
What a great find. no more tripping over confusing spaghetti of cables. thanks
Always top vids with Glenn. Are all these manufacturers systems interchangable with each other? I have a few of the Ward Beck boxes but missed out on the their 25 pin adaptors. Hoping I can use maybe a Lyx with a Ward Beck. Cheers.
How does it handle crosstalk? Can you send a kick drum and guitar through the same snake and see if you can hear any crosstalk in the audio please?
I don’t understand so you can get multiple individual tracks through 1 xlr
Now that I'm practicing standing up, I need one of those things before I injure myself on one of the many cables I have strewn about.
If you're running say 4 (or more of these units) what's the best way to get multiple Cat-5 cables into your DAW? How do you terminate/combine them all on the computer end to combine 4 (or more) of these. Thanks.
Phil
NYC Area
Wondering if this would be suitable to run 9v up to a guitar to power onboard effects? Spoken recently to someone developing a 6mm TRRS jack about this but an ethernet cable may be the more cost effective way.
Also running a Noatronic onboard expression, acoustic piezo signal and standard jack in addition to a Roland pickup, second separate Hexaphonic pickup and XY midi controller so looking to cut down and not have 5 million plugs into/out of the guitar!
About. Fucking. Time that we've figured out this shit. Makes me definitely want to look into Dante or the Motu AVB interfaces at some point.
this is 100% analog.
if you want to run digital audio, you need interface on both ends
@@GuillaumeLortie yep! 100% correct
For a pure digital system Audinates Dante it the way to go for simplicity but there maybe trade offs for scaling, interoperability and sampling/quality where you may want to use AES67 depending on your requirements. AVB is more expensive where you require network switches that support the time sync component of the standard. In devices in this video are purely a Analog device.
@@GuillaumeLortie and you will introduce latency.
Something to consider if there are musicians in your studio is that network cables, especially shielded higher category ones, are significantly more fragile and stiff than your usual mic cables.
Yet the replacement cost is astronomically lower than mic cable!
you can find Cat 6 in solid core or stranded. The solid core is a pain anyway, good for fixed installations, but i wouldn't use it for a cable snake that will be moved and bumped constantly.
Hey glen do they sell the just xlr end that plugs into the box? It would be great it you can buy some shielded CAT5e or CAT6 cable and make custom length runs.