OT: Cable Management Woes

[Riad]

This topic was kind of started in the Digimax96 thread...

OK, the most important piece of non musical gear in the studio? The Brother P-Touch... man I use that thing to death.

Last night I pulled every single cable out of my C|24 and rack and will need to label and tie wrap up everything nicely... it's a PITA but so worth it not to have to deal with all those evil cables. One day everything may be fibre... that would be nice, your 36 XLR mic connection in your live room terminating in your control room with one tiny fibre connection into a virtual patch panel that you can program via software... nice.

[Chris Cavell]

The way I handle cable problems is with the patchbay for the most part...we've got a medussa issue right now that is the direct result of continued upgrades over the past 5 or 6 years.

So, new racks are bing built, control room moved into another room; the same room the wall-boxes are in...so shorter cable runs from the wall-boxes to the patchbays (actually the new racks will encase the wall-boxes...so the runs will be less than a few feet and completely hidden). The old control room will be turned into a second overdub room/small live room with a 16 channel snake in it (we have a cable trough that connects the two rooms to hold the snake in). We'll be installing CAT5 pairs from the new control room to the old one, then from the old one to the live room to use the furman HR-6 headphone system with relative ease. The custom racks I'm gonna be building over the next two weeks will be 3.5 feet high by 2 feet deep (remember there's a protruding wall box behind it so the depth is a bit much compared to what most racks need) and 3+ racks wide. I'm planning on making them just 10 rackspaces at the top and the bottom area just cabinet work. Between the middle braces I'm going to drill some large holes...ones toward the front for power, and ones to the rear for audio. All the patchpanels will be on one side of the room and reach all the gear on the other side via the cable trough that runs along the bottom of the front wall. When completed, the only visible cables will be the ones hanging from the patchbay. We currently use 6 rack spaces of 96 point TT/Bantam patchbays and we'll be going to just 3 (all custom snaked and wired by yours truly of course )..."HOW?"...the main way we're able to do this is by getting rid of the mixer. We've gone completely to standalone pre's and mix ITB for the most part now b/c of serious maintenance issues with the mixer...it seems like it needs to be cleaned once a week these days! So, all the inserts, alt-src inputs, aux outs, buss outs, etc will be removed from the patchbay. We don't use very much in the way of outboard effects these days...so most of that will be removed as well. We'll also be trading out the HUI for a command 8 or maybe a control 24 the next time the trade-in deal is offered by digi and we'll either construct or buy a new desk for everything. I'll be sure to take plenty of photos before, during, and after. I can't wait to get started!

[Riad]

Chris that's some job... you have your work cut out for you. I have the Furman headphone system and you should double check the pinouts on the Cat5 cable you are running... there are special considerations for the Furman.

[Chris Cavell]

Yeah, definitely...I think it's just straight through cable instead of flipped, but I'll have to double check.

Once the room is finished, I'm considering sending a pic to presonus...it'll nearly be a presonus showroom (with all the gear they've sent us over the years !!!).

Actually, I spent about three days planning it all out...pulling out the trusty HP 48G calculator...recalling all my math...and ended settling/deciding upon the simplest design scheme for all of it's advantages...the one disadvantage really is that it just won't look quite as cool as the original idea would have looked, but it has MANY advantages...including the fact that it shouldn't take more than a day to construct, a day to stain/finish, a day to move, and a day to wire up...throw in a day or two for tracking down buggies and we're all good. We have to have an outside company do the wall runs of the CAT5 probably, so that is on the backburner really, unless we decide to get a super-spool and run it over the ceiling ourselves and leave dangling cables instead of wall outlets...not fun (but less connections to go bad in the end)! Really, that time-table is pretty generous...each step could in reality be completed in four or five hours...so there's plenty of leeway included. Like I said, I CAN'T WAIT!!!

[lemix]

Hi there,

Do it once...but do it right. Then just forget about it, life will return to normal, the Guinness will taste better, and you can put a disclaimer in your ads;
" at Riad's...where everything works ! "
Just did a studio swap a couple of months ago. Lots of outboard stuff all into a 4X96 point bantam PB. First, I had to take it out from the old place..had to cut some ends off as the thick, twisted wires with XLR ends didn't quite fit through the belly bay cut outs of the console.
Yep.."Brother P-touch"...do you have the USB version ?
At the new place, we had to make room to accommodate my gear as well as his. Stuff had to be moved to different racks in the control room.
I was kind of lucky, as the studio just hired on a young kid right out of Audio/Broadcast college.
So now there were three of us..cleaning, soldering, labeling.
Now its done... Everything works, no hum, no wires visible. All runs are behind the console and in the walls. The studio had planned for this at the onset, and there was enough room to feed the branches tru.

good luck, and don't let the fridge go empty...
cheers,

[Paul14]

Chris-
Just FYI - the cable for the HR-6 is standard ethernet, which is straight through.

Paul