Pre-made Snakes, Adapters and my first post...

[Kathy]

Hi all,

I'm a first time poster but have been lurking for a while and soaking up all the reading that is offered. I've done my reasonable best to read all of the stickies and to educate myself on the preferences of this forum. I can't guarantee that I won't accidently be redundant on a subject but I can promise that I've taken the time to do the required searches before making a public inquiry.

I'm female.
As a rule, that shouldn't matter as creative and artistic genius isn't prejudice to gender. However, I'm going to play the "I'm a girl" card anyways in hopes it will buy me a bit more slack from you all in terms of the studio carpentry, building materials, and general constructions issues that you men have WAY more natural background in from almost the minute you were born! For some reason, the average guy always seems to "know" the basics of the fusebox, how to wire an electrical outlet, how to build a shed, tinker with an engine, and so on. You get the point - this stuff seems almost genetic. I'm ashamed to say I don't even know how to change the oil in my car or a flat tire for that matter. That knowledge, or lack of, certainly has no bearing or reflection upon my skills as a talented and competent songwriter and producer, however. And it is in that frame of mind that I come to you. I know my strengths and weaknesses and I am here to learn all that I can that will make me a better well rounded artist.

Just give me the extra bit of slack when I don't understand the difference between a joist and a stud!

Onto my question:

I recently bought my first home. It has an attached building to it that once was a barn. It is gutted and unfinished. The size is about 16 ft wide x 25 ft long with 11 foot high ceilings on the left side of the room that steadily slopes down to 8 feet high on the right side of the room. I am turning this building into a studio with the help of one good friend (who is also the local police sargeant with a wife and 3 kids so time is limited and we are only able to work on it twice a week).

My control room is going to take up about 14 feet of the length. We will be building double studded walls the proper way with 2 layers of gypsum board, one 1/2 inch and one 5/8. There will be a double glass window in the wall facing out to the remaining live room which will be about 10 feet long. The control room will be covered with a low ceiling - about 6.6. That will leave the cathedral style open roof above it that now becomes part of the remaining live room. The space over the control room ceiling will be a loft but mostly for beanbag furniture to lounge in. You will only be able to stand closest to the left wall where the ceiling is at its highest and not as it slopes down to the other side. That little extra is a bit ambitious on my part and may not work but I wanted to utilize the extra upper space somehow for guests to be able to look down upon the live room area.

In the live room will be a small vocal booth in the corner also with a covered ceiling. The other corner will feature a 3 foot high half wall with a ledge all around it like a "cage" to house the drumkit. I do not need isolation as the kit is a 12 piece electronic set from Hart Dynamics. I just want a half wall surrounding the kit where I can use the ledge for a flat screen LCD, perhaps a Pro Tools 002 console, etc...

Here's my question:

Wiring has been a big issue for me for days. I have spent over a week working on a chart and laying out what I need. The problem is I have always used premade snakes when working out of a master bedroom. Now that the room is much bigger the length is longer and they don't come premade that big. I have a couple of choices. I could make my own (and I have studied all the brands and website to acquire the materials) but I am very scared to do so. I just don't want to go there. The biggest obstacle I have is that I need a 24 channel snake (or three 8 channel snakes) that runs 30 feet and has TRS connectors on both ends. It doesn't exist out there. Either the length is too short or the length is right but the ends are XLR, etc....

So....
If I can find a 30 foot snake that has TRS on at least one end but XLRs on the other end, will I lose any quality if I buy the adapters to make the XLR end TRS? Is this ok to do? I know I could cut the XLRs and solder on TRS but I'd rather not do that. Can I use adapters faithfully?

The other question is if I can find two 24 channel 15 foot snakes that are TRS on both ends, can I buy adapters to couple them together to give me the 30 foot length I need and if so, how does this affect signal quality again? This seems like a Mickey Mouse way of doing it but I'd like to hear facts as to why it wouldn't work.

FYI: We will be running PVC conduits under the floor housing the snakes. I have a 48 point TRS patchbay that will be built into the back wall of the live room about 4 feet high up the wall. The snake will come up the wall from under the floor and terminate at the patchbay. On the control room end, the snake will come up out of the floor at a trap door built under the desk and into a patchbay rack on top of the desk.
There will also be a half size modular patchbay by HOSA (just 8 inputs) built into the vocal booth wall with connections to the main back wall in the live room and the control room as well. There will be a third patchbay at a mini station, another half modular by HOSA, on the right hand side of the live room with connections leading to the main back wall of the live room and also the control room. There will be 2 dedicated headphone jacks at each one of these three patchbay locations in the live room.

For mic jacks - I am either going to run the mini half modular XLR patchbays by HOSA (brand new, it has 3 jacks) by building them into the wall at each of the 3 locations in the live room (main back wall, mini right wall, vocal booth) OR I am considering a stage box style snake. The only problem with that is I wouldn't have a true mic jack in the vocal booth - I would be plugging into the box in the live room and then may not be able to shut the door properly in the vocal booth with the mic cable in the way.

So, that's where I am right now. I badly want to show you a diagram like the beautiful ones drawn here but I can't seem to pick up that knack. I have a Mac and love it. I have Sketch Up as well. But I cannot get it to work for me and look right! I will post some pictures of the building and see if that will be of help to visualize. I can also try and do an Appleworks drawing I suppose.

Thanks for reading my first post and I look forward to your input. We have LOTS of questions as we go along and I am feverishly trying to read everything on sound locks and double doors, floors on top of floors, carpet or wood, and the biggie - ventilation, heat and air. I have NONE. It is a cold barn out there that is an oven in the summer and we are building it now with no plans for HVAC at all. A mistake, I know. But we will figure that out soon enough. For now, we are digging and starting our floor. The barn floor is old wood that is weak in areas. We have cut out 10 holes and dug down to pour cement posts to support the beams. Then we will build the floor frame, insulate and lay down our PVC for wiring. Cover with one (or two?) layers of plywood and create the trapdoors for access to the wiring. From there we move onto framing walls....

Thanks again for such a wonderful and informative site. I hope to be here thru the duration of this project and longafter.

Kathy

http://www.kathylabonte.com
http://www.musiciansforprogress.org/index2.html

[Aaronw]

Greetings and Welcome to the site.

In reference to the cabling, whether it should be one length, or 2 coupled together, etc. I would recommend doing one length if possible. As you mentioned, you will be running pvc conduits, and you wouldn't be able to have them connectors in the middle unless you had a 6 or 8" conduit run.

You can get custom made cables, or even prefab'd cables, but from a cost standpoint, it's usually cheaper to custom make the cable, especially since you'll be running it through conduit and usually the connectors will get caught up in it.


I'll add more to the reply a little later. Gotta get back to work. But if you have some additional questions, please post, and I'll answer when I can.

Thanks.

[Kathy]

Thanks for reading and responding to my post.

I agree with you about not coupling two snakes together. Deep inside I knew that but was hoping to hear otherwise. You know how it is....you know what is right but you hope someone will tell you the easy way will work anyway.

At any rate, after much thought and no sleep, I went out in the barn this morning and sat. And sat. And sat some more. I came up with a very simple solution that solves some problems. I will simply re-arrange my setup. I'll swap the drum area and vocal booth around. That's it. They will be opposite my original design.

This means now being able to move the MAIN patchbay from the back wall now over to the side wall (where it needs to be positioned to the left of the drum area for various reasons including the TD10 brain and the Digi002 console that will both be out there and hard wired permanently in the live room). This brings the main patchbay about 7 feet closer to the control room patchbay rack and therefore brings me to where I need to be for length in order to buy the HOSA premade 23.1 length snakes. I need 24 channels so I'll purchase 3 and should be ok.

This setup also solves my vocal setup problem. The vocal booth will now be in the opposite corner. I will place the half modular XLR patchbay by HOSA into the vocal wall (there are 3 mic connections in each of these little units). I will place another unit just like it outside of the vocal booth into the back of the live room wall. They'll only be about 2 feet apart but one will be contained inside the vocal booth and the other will be stationed outside in the wall of the live room. I found a 30 foot XLR snake with 8 channels (2 more than I need) which will connect to both (will work fine and reach both units with the 2 foot fan at the end) and then it will run under the floor to the control room.

I still need to have connections between the back wall and the main side wall though so I'll deal with that next. Which still leaves me wondering about my original question:

If I do find another snake that has my TRS connectors on at least one end but has the XLR connections on the other end, can I use adapters on the XLR end to make them TRS? Do I lose any quality doing that? Can I get by doing that for just an 8 channel situation?

Thanks again for your time. I'll try to get some pictures to you later.

Kathy

[Aaronw]

If I do find another snake that has my TRS connectors on at least one end but has the XLR connections on the other end, can I use adapters on the XLR end to make them TRS? Do I lose any quality doing that? Can I get by doing that for just an 8 channel situation?

Any place there's a connection, the signal is reduced. Just the law of physics.

But usually for most people, you don't notice it and won't have any problems unless you were running extremely longs lines or have a scope to measure the loss.

I probably wouldn't worry about it. I've had to do this many times in the studio without any issue's. One of the things to consider though, adding those adapters on the end, and having them stick out further from the equipment, be sure to support/strain relief the cable some, our you could break the connections on the equipment.

Hope this helps...

[knightfly]

Also Kathy, if you decide you want to learn to make your own cables we can help; for a more professional look in your studio, building custom cables keeps the clutter of extra cable length to a minimum. Not to mention the least noise effect of having fewer mechanical connections in each cable run, and the satisfaction of having "built it yourself" -

If this isn't your cup of tea, no problem; just letting you know that help is available. I taught soldiers how to be electronic techs for a few years, so just because you're female should be no challenge at all

[Kathy]

Thanks Knightfly! Both for your offer of help and for responding. I sort of feel like I'm talking to a celebrity - I've been reading the forum for 3 weeks almost daily and I've read MANY of your writings. I feel like I know you.

To be honest, I'm very electronically inclined. My family and friends rely on me for all that stuff and being a music producer and one time apprentice in a studio, I'm really a lot more capable and "intelligent" (for lack of a better word) than I'm letting on. I know I could do the cables with your instruction and the wealth of info out there that is also available. I think the real reason that I am more hesitant is because I have so much more on my plate right now with building the actual studio and getting it to physically exist. While that is happening, I have a master bedroom that I am using that is completely unwired at the moment and I need to hook it all up pronto so I have a working atmosphere while building the new place.

Since I did solve my problem of length by re-designing my layout (and I ordered my HOSA 23 ft cables today for a damn good price I might add!), I am over the worst hump now. So, I am thinking of buying some of the Mogami cable I see on ebay and taking you up on your offer to learn so that I can make the remaining less important cables (less important in terms of time frame - I don't need them right away until the floor is done out in the barn whereas I needed the others to hook up my temp studio now). So, I will buy some cable and connectors and I'll be ready to get into that within the next couple of weeks I anticipate.

I'm looking forward to taking you up on your offer!

Oh, and I'm SURE I'll need lots of advice on the studio construction as we go as well. So far, we are doing just as I have read and no questions just yet.

Kathy

[gullfo]

In addition to HOSA, there are other brands of snakes (read: other size and configuration options) out there that may address your needs in case the final layout has to change. I've seen any number of snake products with XLR-TRS boxes/connectors you could readily feed through a conduit. It will really depend on your budget because the nicer grade snakes can run $500-$1000.

http://www.directproaudio.com/shop/cables/snakes.cfm

OTOH, if you can wield a soldering iron (and it really only take some moderate instruction and a couple of hours practice) you can build the wiring you need and probably save quite a bit of money. Plus if you use the AES type digital cable with low capacitance, you'll probably end up with better quality signals... Not to mention you'll be an expert if you have to troubleshoot it

http://www.nemal.com/cables.htm
http://www.colomar.com/Shavano/snake_cable_diy.html

(note: not affiliated with these sites - but just to give some ideas on whats out there...)

HTH

[len-morgan]

Kathy,

Is your floor construction made of wood planks? If so, I would suggest building a semi-removable wooden cover instead of the PVC conduit. If the boards a a couple of inches wide, you could glue/screw common rain gutter material to one or both sides to lay the cable in and then put the board back on.

My concern with the PVC, especially if you have a connection mid-way (i.e., you can't get to it after you push the cable through it) is that a couple of the connections might become intermittant or break. Then you've got to pull the whole thing back out (which you may or may not be able to do once you're finished) and fix it. Or you live with one less wire pair. The "trauma" of pulling the cable back to make the repair may damage more connectors.

One other possibility since you are building double stud walls, is to run the cable between the walls. That's what I'm doing in my studio and since I've got a couple of doorways to get over, I bought some bicycle hanger hooks (46 cents each at Walmart) and screwed these in at various points along the way to suspend the cable off the floor. It's cheap and the hooks are big enough to hold several 16 and 8 pair cable runs.

Hope that helps a little.

len