The Greatest, Cheapest Audio Snake you (probably) already own!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.พ. 2021
- Snake cables are bulky and expensive. Here's a look at the cheapest, cleanest, most awesome 4 channel audio snake in the world. Chances are you already have some!
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About Spectre Sound Studios:
I'm Glenn Fricker, engineer here at Spectre Sound Studios. I love making records, and after doing it for sixteen years, I want to pass on what I've learned. On my channel you can find tutorials on how to record guitar, bass, real drums and vocals. There's reviews and demos of tube amps, amp sims, drums, mics, preamps, outboard gear, Electric Guitar, Bass Guitar, and plugin effects.
We've covered Moon on the Water, played Bias FX, given you the absolute best in Stupid Musician Texts, ranted & raved about bass guitar, and this channel is where The Eagle has Landed.
Everything you've wanted to learn about recording Hard Rock & Heavy Metal can be found right here on this channel!
I also respond to your comments & questions: The best make it into the SMG Viewer's Comments series of videos. Loads of fun, lots of laughs.
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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%
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!
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!!!
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.
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
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
Thanks for this Glen, you've got me rethinking my wiring layout for my next studio build. Cheers!
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
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 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.
Building a new studio this year? AWESOME!!! Greetings from Córdoba, Argentina.
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.
Thanks for the great gear tips you keep putting out!
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.
This is really cool, and just what I needed. Thanks!
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.
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.
Wow this is awesome!! Thanks so much for sharing. I’m going to order some right now!!
Very informative and concise! Thanks.
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!
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.
Fantastic stuff! Thanks man! 🤘🔥👏👏
Hi Gleen! Can't wait for that Lindell Audio 500 series video! Cheers from Colombia :D
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!
*waiting for price to be 1000 USD*
"For 60 bucks"
Damn... that's honestly a steal...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
Almost all of my mic cables are LyxPro. Great brand & value. Thanks for the heads up Glenn!
Thanks for the tip Glenn , this really helpful!
Yeah, these are great!!
Looks amazing for live sound too
I will keep this in mind for when I eventually get around to building my jam room
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!
Very much looking forward to a new studio build! Staying in Windsor?
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
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?
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.
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!!
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.
This is awesome Glenn!!!
Yeah, I'm very impressed with it. Can't wait to try wiring up the new studio with it!
Dave Rat at RatSound/ Soundtools makes awesome CAT snakes as well, great quality for stage and studio!
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
Please please PLEASE show us the process of building the new studio!
You got it!
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!
For my situation I’ve been using the wired ones for the stage box and the ones without cables to make custom lengths so can put the box anywhere I need
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.
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.
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 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! :)
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.
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.
What a great find. no more tripping over confusing spaghetti of cables. thanks
thanks a lot for the vid! i am going to build a cat5 headphone mixer setup, so that each musician can change the volumes of up to 4 Aux Sends from the desk. it's good to hear that you approve of the sound quality enough that it can be used for mics, too!!
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
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.
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
Thanks for the great video. Only wish I'd found it before I recently bought a 30m conventional snake.
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?
Thank you!!!
That's a great idea!
Cool video!
How would you get those into the Interface though?
How do you connect cat6 to an interface?
Answers would be appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
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!
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.
This video is awesome! Big fan of your videos dude. Would I be able to use these for live sound? If so, how could I run these into a rack to clear a stage up?
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
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 🤘🏽🤘🏽🤘🏽
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?
Redco sells a system too, and they're my personal favourite place to buy bulk studio cable from.
Love Lyx stuff. All my mic cables are theirs. I even have a pair of their pencil condensers
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.
Hey Glenn,
I was just wondering how they are set up? Does the cat6 cable run from the male break out to the female or vise versa? Or can you run the cat6 cable straight into your computer? P.S. thank you for all the content you put out on your channel.
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.
Glenn, thanks for all the great content! I searched TH-cam and haven’t found much on the subject of mixing live FOH sound using only REAPER, an interface and snake. I’ve read a couple threads on the REAPER forums and have gotten a few good tips,… but I was curious if you had any insight? (I’m not familiar with your live sound engineering experience)… If you’re not familiar with using REAPER in this context before, maybe a contact you have could possibly share some knowledge as far as setup, routing, using stock plugs or third party, and anything else that could be useful? I just find REAPER to be such a stable environment and coded so well to utilize a system’s resources without overtaxing them, that it almost seems a no-brainer for FOH mixing if the latency can be kept to a minimum? Thanks again for sharing your knowledge in such a educational yet entertaining way!
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
Hey Glen. Awesome video!
Question about the with vs without cable versions. I understand that in your case it would be a permanent setup and not moved much, but would you be concerned about the longevity and fixability of the cables, whereas the cable-less version has the benefit of just switching out the cable if it breaks?
That would be correct.
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.
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
Very cool.
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 th-cam.com/video/f0nKK43Oeas/w-d-xo.html
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.
Thank you.. I wasn't sure about that
Hey Glen is shielded cable necessary if you don’t need phantom power? Also, will CAT5E work with this system? Would it cut down the number of channels? Thanks!!
I've read a review claiming phase issues when using a pair of I/O for stereo pairs. Also does phantom power run through all 4 mic lines or can you use say 2 xlr to carry phantom power (drum OH's) and 2 for dynamic snare mics simultaneously?
I got another simular from room to room. It works great 👍
Networking fused with Pro Audio is a really cool as fuck combination, finally something that I've learned in college will apply to my work in the studio to simplify routing signals.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
Just grabbed a pair to put in my ISO box, 1 CAT-6 cable is a lot better then 3 XLR leads. Thanks Glen
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.
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.
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
This really might make things easier with my band's IEM rack.
Wish I had known about this system last November when I was setting up a small system
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.
Do these only work with microphones? Or, could I hook up some acoustic preamp/di boxes?