I thought today we'd take a look at
these audio over ethernet cable adapters.
..talk about what they are... and what they
are not.
first, there's nothing digital about them.
there's no circuitry of note inside them.
they are just taking advantage of the
readily available shielded ethernet and
ethercon cables that we can easily find
these days.
and breaking these out into four
balanced audio lines.
while they'll work with standard
shielded ethernet cable, for foot traffic
and high use applications, you'll likely
want to use shielded ethercon cables.
those can take more abuse and they have
heavy duty locking connectors.
since i have a lot of various lengths of
shielded cat5e ethercon cables in
inventory to work with the m32 and x32
consoles, I always have a lot of these
cables available for these adapters. And
these adapters work with any console.
analog or digital.
if you look on the jacket of the cable
you'll either see 'utp', which stands for
unshielded twisted pair, or you'll see
'stp' which stands for shielded twisted
pair.
Also, the connectors on a properly
shielded cable will have metal on the
outside connector for the shield contact.
Make sure whatever cable you use is 'stp',
shielded twisted pair. These dongles will
work with cat5e 'stp' or higher.
You can see there are boxes available
and box to xlr fans. You can also find
companies selling these with 5 pin xlrs
for running up to 4 dmx universes of
lighting. The more of these dongles you
have, the more options you can think of
for uses.
We can do a test and we can see that
phantom power does pass through them.
"...and we're testing the microphone with
phantom power. Phantom power on.
Check." And since the ethernet cable
between them can easily be swapped out,
they can be any length you need, when you
need it.
probably the most obvious use is a
fan to fan (audio) snake. Male connectors on one
end and female connectors on the other
end. Use these for drive lines for front
of house, or monitors, or iem transmitter
connections...
You can also configure them into four
channel sub snakes. A fan with male xlrs
to a box with female xlrs. Anywhere that
you can use a subsnake on stage, you can
put one together. Your downstage vocal
line for example or a horn section.
you can also think outside of the box
and use these for turnarounds using the
same gender adapter on each end of the
cable. ...changing sends to returns or
returns to sends on a house snake for
example.
Let's open one up and see how it's built.
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this brand uses an all-aluminum box
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with plastic end caps
the connectors all connect to the top
panel...
and then it slides out.
the shields are all tied together and the
meter confirms this.
the solder work is clean,
and everything looks well put together.
let's look at an xlr cable end from a box
to fan and see its connections.
I've got several of these and I've
noticed some differences between the
older versions and the most recent ones...
But nothing that's a deal breaker.
One obvious change is the cable color
codes are now different.
That just means you have to pay
attention to the numbers and not the
colors when connecting them.
As you can see, there's really no special
circuitry at play here. Just straight
through wiring for four balanced analog
connections,
CBI, Lyx Pro, Rat Sound, Radial and others
all make versions of these.
I'll leave amazon affiliate links in the
text below.
Here's another video about cable
management that you might want to check
out. If you like information like this
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other videos, and I will see you next
time!
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