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Author Topic: Snake Thoughts  (Read 5950 times)

born to be mild

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Snake Thoughts
« on: May 06, 2004, 03:25:42 AM »

Looking for suggestions on a high-quality 24/4 snake... running 100 feet between church stage and a 32 channel analog board.  What I've seen listed comes at a pretty wide variety of prices, and I don't know how to tell the good ones from the rest.

Thanks!
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Ray Abbitt

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Re: Snake Thoughts
« Reply #1 on: May 06, 2004, 04:09:13 AM »

born to be mild wrote on Thu, 06 May 2004 00:25

Looking for suggestions on a high-quality 24/4 snake... running 100 feet between church stage and a 32 channel analog board.  What I've seen listed comes at a pretty wide variety of prices, and I don't know how to tell the good ones from the rest.
If this is going to be an installed system ruggedness isn't as important and you might even think of buying raw cable and adding your own connectors. However, it would probably cost more than buying an EWI snake from Mark Hellinger. <http://www.audiopile.net/> I haven't seen the snakes, but I've seen some of his other cables and stuff. It is worth just going to his page and reading his descriptions. For example:

Technical Description:
The EWI PSPX 24 x 8 series snake is a medium quality professional product.

Call Mark and tell him what you need. I met him at Bink's amp shootout and he's one of the good guys. You can also find his stuff on eBay.

-ray
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Rob Warren

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Re: Snake Thoughts
« Reply #2 on: May 13, 2004, 01:35:51 AM »

I have had pleasing results from several kinds of wire.  You might check out whirlwinds snake cable.  It's belden wire I think, you can order bulk length and put your own connectors on or even order a custom job with maybe the connectors or box on one end and the other blunt cut so you can run it through pipe or ceiling or some way of hiding it, then terminate that end. The reason I like this cable is because it's jackets are already numbered individually and the wire is all the same meaning there is no confusing color code as far as pin hot or cold.  It's all like red, black, shield.  Some multipair cable will not be this way.  

Other option especially if in conduit....get reels of raw mic cable like belden or west penn and make your own looms and custom terminate.

Are you going to use floor pockets?

Rob
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Rob

born to be mild

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Re: Snake Thoughts
« Reply #3 on: May 14, 2004, 06:32:11 PM »

Yes, we'll be using floor pockets at the stage end.

One of the things that seems confusing is that some of the less-expensive snakes uses 22 gauge wire, while the more-expensive ones use 24.  That seems counterintuitive to me.
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Rob Warren

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Re: Snake Thoughts
« Reply #4 on: May 14, 2004, 11:46:16 PM »

I don't know about the quality but I prefer working with the 22 awg wires.  Just because it's a little bigger and easier to terminate.  Personally I wouldn't worry to much about the quality.  If you get something from whirlwind, rapco or proco, I don't think you are going to be disappointed.  West Penn, Canare, Belden are good brands of wire.  I would stay away from some cheap off brand sold by some box house or something.  This kind of subject always tends to bring different opinions.  I've learned over the years to also consider the environment your listening in.  A typical church sanctuary is not going to sound good enough acoustically or electronically to hear the difference between a whirlwind snake versus a proco snake.  The size or gauge depends on what you're gonna do with the wire as well.  With floor pockets you'll need to take those mic lines and bring them together somewhere behind stage and get them going to FOH.  You'll obviously be using raw mic cable and run your floor pockets with that but then you'll have to terminate / splice at a focus point to send all those lines to FOH.  How are you planning to do this?
 Were you wanting a road snake in order to run floor pocket lines and then just plug those into the stage box end of the snake?  Not a bad way, I've seen this before.  This would also give you a mic patch point if you decide to change what mic jack goes to which fader on the mixer without having to get behind the mixer.  There are more "correct" ways to acheive this but this way would be okay.  
 If you didn't use a road snake and just got snake cable you could use some type of punch block to splice the floor pocket lines into the snake cable.  This punch block would be housed in a metal box for RF shielding.  Obviously you would not have the luxury of a patchpoint like I described earlier.  
 Some jobs I've done the designer did NOT want any break in the mic line so we had to run raw mic lines all the way from floor pocket to mixer.  This was all in conduit.  
Lots of options here just depends on what you want to do and how much money you have to spend on this.  Hope this helps.

Rob
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Rob

Steve Stallings

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Re: Snake Thoughts
« Reply #5 on: May 27, 2004, 04:49:03 PM »

 Are these EWI snakes ok? They are about half the price of a comparable Medusa Standard. I just got a quote on a 100 foot Medusa Standard 24x8 = $649  
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Kevin Maxwell AKA TheMAXX

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Re: Snake Thoughts
« Reply #6 on: May 30, 2004, 01:08:21 PM »

If I am reading your post correctly what I am about to suggest probably doesn’t apply to you but is something to think about in some installs.

If the cable runs are under the floor or over the ceiling (or somewhere out of the way) one option is to get a 500-foot (or longer) roll of 6 pair and run multiple runs. The advantage of this is you can put the stage ends in different places and make your mic cable runs shorter on the stage. This is assuming that you will be doing the terminating of the stage and the mix ends yourself.
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Kevin Maxwell
Freelance Audio Eng. QBE

ProSoundWeb Community

Re: Snake Thoughts
« Reply #6 on: May 30, 2004, 01:08:21 PM »


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