OK GUYS! You're all right and wrong! There we go... No seriously, of course you can use them and they most likely will work and give you no trouble. However, you COULD run into problems in some situations, such as real RF heavy areas or where theres a lot of AC nearby. Look very close at the "audio" patch panels...
1) The special units like ADC have a specially designed punch down "bite" that grabs the wire differently from a 66 or 110 block, which is for solid wire PRIMARILY, as I believe Karl so well put it. More solid connection... good for weak signals. Line or speaker level stuff might not notice a less solid connection as much.
2) They also don't keep the connection out in the open long--just enough to get past that 1/8" or so back panel, then it's back into the 22-24 ga shielded cable again till it hits the 1/4" jacks. The 66 blocks line up every conductor in parallel with each other and right out in the open, like "Hey interference, gimme your best shot!"
Also, 66 block guys, please understand that a "speaker level" and "line level" signal are way different than an unamplified "mic level signal". If I'm not mistaken, we're talking a very weak signal here (mere millivolts? for a mic) that has to travel several hundred feet sometimes before it hits a preamp for the first time. An exception would be a keyboards, etc... which should be driving the line a lot harder to begin with (~line level). In addition, you are already relying pretty heavily on Mr. CMR to do his job and get rid of noise as much as possible.
So, I guess you just have to know the surrounding environment real well... If you know for sure thet you have an RF/EMF free area and can't afford the ADC stuff, then give em a shot. I DO understand where you're coming from, because the 66/110 stuff terminates in a breeze. Then again it usually only takes us up to a couple of hours to terminate and test a 48-point ADC bay using our current tooling.
On a simlarly-related subject, I heard that the Furman IEM systems get away with using twisted pair by driving the line extremely hard and then dropping the level back down at the receiving end... if somebody knows different, please let me know. Anyways, it is my understanding that this is how they are getting away with using UTP with "telco" connectors on their big IEM system and "RJ45" connectors on their smaller systems.
Well, hope you enjoyed my rant.
Sorry if I offended some of you by stating so much of the obvious, but hey, to some people it may not be so obvious.
Steve