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[DavidTurner]

We recently had a festival sound co provide a cat5 snake for our vi3000 so that we would not have to wait to get our snake out. For some reason, the Soundcraft would not see the stage rack. The sound co ran another set of cat5 - still vi3000 sees no stage rack. In desperation, we ran our own snake and suddenly, stage rack recognized! The sound co said that they used both of their cat 5 snakes with an array of different consoles - including their vi6 and had thoroughly tested their snakes before loading them on the truck... Does anybody here have any idea why this would not have worked?

[Steve Payne]

We recently had a festival sound co provide a cat5 snake for our vi3000 so that we would not have to wait to get our snake out. For some reason, the Soundcraft would not see the stage rack. The sound co ran another set of cat5 - still vi3000 sees no stage rack. In desperation, we ran our own snake and suddenly, stage rack recognized! The sound co said that they used both of their cat 5 snakes with an array of different consoles - including their vi6 and had thoroughly tested their snakes before loading them on the truck... Does anybody here have any idea why this would not have worked?

How long was the snake, David?  Solid or stranded? ... Really doesn't make much sense if it works with their Vi6.

[DavidTurner]

I don't know those answers Steve. I suspect they were stranded as they were purpose built for live audio. It didn 't make sense to the Beach Sound huys either. They thought it would be pointless to pull our own snake. As I said, we were deperate and ready to try anything.

[David Sturzenbecher]

I don't know those answers Steve. I suspect they were stranded as they were purpose built for live audio. It didn 't make sense to the Beach Sound huys either. They thought it would be pointless to pull our own snake. As I said, we were deperate and ready to try anything.

David,
Is your snake solid or stranded?  Shielded? How long was the one you pulled out?  The soundcraft stage boxes are MADI correct?

[DavidTurner]

I'm not absolutely certain - I'm the monitor engineer and this is the house console, but I believe our snake is stranded - 100 meters (certain about the length). I believe the interface is Dante. My understanding that MADI requires BNC/Coax. This unit uses Cat5 Ethernet cable.

The sound co provided Cat5 cable with ethercon connectors on a reel. Judging from the amount left on the reel compared to the amount of my snake remaining in my snake trunk, I believe they were about the same length. As I said earlier, the sound co in question used their snake with various Yamaha and Soundcraft consoles.

To clarify, we tried two different snakes provided by the sound co before pulling ours. Ours worked, theirs didn't.

Sorry to not have better information. This was a "wire and fire" situation with the clock ticking and frantic (on our part) grasping at any straws available to get the show on.

Of course the next day when we had time to troubleshoot every thing worked as expected.

David,
Is your snake solid or stranded?  Shielded? How long was the one you pulled out?  The soundcraft stage boxes are MADI correct?

[Mac Kerr]

I believe the interface is Dante. My understanding that MADI requires BNC/Coax. This unit uses Cat5 Ethernet cable.

I think the Vi stageboxes connect via MADI. MADI does not require coax, it can work on coax, category cable, or fiber. The Studer implementation is via category or fiber.

Mac

[eric lenasbunt]

I think the Vi stageboxes connect via MADI. MADI does not require coax, it can work on coax, category cable, or fiber. The Studer implementation is via category or fiber.

Mac

The Vi consoles are Madi and can be fiber or Cat5 version, depending on how you order it

[DavidTurner]

Thank you gentlemen. I stand corrected.

The Vi consoles are Madi and can be fiber or Cat5 version, depending on how you order it

[John Sulek]

Thank you gentlemen. I stand corrected.

When we first started using a Vi6 at FOH we went through a few different brands of Ethernet cable before finding one that worked reliably at 300ft. Our experience was the stage rack would lose sync with the local rack(FOH). Currently we have a vendor provided optical MADI link to FOH and ethernet MADI link at the monitor end.

The one thing I've found is that occasionally the MADI cards need a re-seating. Just pull the cards part way out and re-seat a few times. The backplane carries the clock signal and when things get a bit loose strange things start to happen. Also a good idea to make sure all that all the screws holding the card frame together are good and tight.

You can swap the MADI cards in the local and stage racks to either version (Ethernet or Optical). two captive screws and you're done.
The  Vi series stage and local racks use Studer i/o modules rebranded for Soundcraft. Soundcraft makes the surface and the Lexicon fx card.

Cheers

[Andrew Moyer]

The only question I would have for the company that provided that snake is if all 8 pins on the RJ45s were connected.  Standard ethernet cabling uses pins 1,2,3 & 6 for your computer. With MADI over CAT5, it also uses pins 4 & 5 which is the word clock. Without this, local and stage racks do not lock up.

I had a similar problem once and re-terminated the CAT5 cable that was installed in the building and it fixed it.

Andrew

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