Topic: Ethercon snakes

[tourtelot]

Cat5e is four twisted pair and one shield with a drain wire.  In the analog XLR boxes, that shield is common to all four pair on Pin 1, and serves as the conductor to allow P48 on those four pair as well.

D.

[GLouie]

What Doug says, assuming you have "shielded" CAT5/6; the shield is over all the pairs, not individual pairs. Unshielded is probably more common (UTP, unshielded twisted pairs) since it seems to have been the original standard and is cheaper and easier to put connectors on. As noted previously, there are CAT snake boxes that use unshielded CAT cable but can only do 3 channels with P48, or 4 channels without P48. Buyer beware.

[bluegrass_brad]

I have been using these on occasion for a couple of years now with no issues.  I have the LyxPro brand. I use a shielded CAT7 cable and have no issues with phantom or noise. I have used them with cable up to 50' long with no issues at all. So much easier to run a single ethernet cable.

[kuba e]

I was thinking about an ethernet snake a year ago. I ended up buying a classic snake. I was worried that the ethernet snake would be fragile and I would damage it by winding it up frequently. But the advantage of ethernet cable is attractive, light, easily replaceable and low price. I am posting links here. These adapters should be able to carry phantom according to reviews.
https://www.thomannmusic.com/the_sssnake_cat_snake_3fc.htm?reload=1
https://www.thomann.de/gb/the_sssnake_cat_snake_3mc.htm

They also sell an ethernet cable, but it looks like it can't carry phantom because the cable cat6e has no shielding.
https://www.thomannmusic.com/pro_snake_cat6e_cable_10m.htm

If I understand correctly, the shielding (used for the phantom) connects via the external metal connector, not the ethernet connector (RJ45 is plastic and has only 8 pins).

[voltronic]

I have been using these on occasion for a couple of years now with no issues.  I have the LyxPro brand. I use a shielded CAT7 cable and have no issues with phantom or noise. I have used them with cable up to 50' long with no issues at all. So much easier to run a single ethernet cable.

Which cable are you using?

[mountaintaper]

https://www.markertek.com/product/ets-pa202f/ets-pa202f-instasnake-adapter-4-fxlr-to-rj45-jack-all-pins

I've been using this one for years with 150ft shielded cat6 cable for about a decade 48v on 4 channels, no issues.

[goodcooker]

I finally bit the bullet and put together a 4 channel snake with boxes from Seismic Audio. I gave them a call to check on the compatibility since I was doing a sort of mix and match thing with the input side being the basic 4 XLRF connector box (like the Lyxpro ones) and the output side having 4 XLRM cable breakouts. This makes more sense for me and keeps the weight down a little eliminating the breakout cables on the inputs and not requiring separate cables on the output side. All in $80 bucks free shipping.

Output side - https://www.seismicaudiospeakers.com/products/saet-4m-3-4-channel-rj45-ethercon-to-xlr-male-breakout-audio-snake-cable-3-feet?variant=40494360657989
Input side - https://www.seismicaudiospeakers.com/collections/all/products/sasb-et4f-4-channel-xlr-female-to-ethercon-network-cable-adapter-extender

They actually went and got the items I was looking for, hooked them up and continuity tested them to make sure they worked together for me while I was on the phone. I like it.

Now to find out if the ethercon cable I ordered does the trick. I'm hearing from users that it's very important to have STP - shielded twisted pair - cable for this application but specs for a lot of these items is somewhat scarce. I ordered a cable from GearIt. $50 for 50 feet. It's the same cable they include with their snake boxes so hopefully it all pans out.

I hope to do some charitable recording and streaming at the local Jazz Festival (all the revenues fund education programs) in the coming months and this will make it lots easier to get onstage mics run to an out of the way location without hauling a tote full of XLR cables.

[billydee]

I finally bit the bullet and put together a 4 channel snake with boxes from Seismic Audio. I gave them a call to check on the compatibility since I was doing a sort of mix and match thing with the input side being the basic 4 XLRF connector box (like the Lyxpro ones) and the output side having 4 XLRM cable breakouts. This makes more sense for me and keeps the weight down a little eliminating the breakout cables on the inputs and not requiring separate cables on the output side. All in $80 bucks free shipping.

Output side - https://www.seismicaudiospeakers.com/products/saet-4m-3-4-channel-rj45-ethercon-to-xlr-male-breakout-audio-snake-cable-3-feet?variant=40494360657989
Input side - https://www.seismicaudiospeakers.com/collections/all/products/sasb-et4f-4-channel-xlr-female-to-ethercon-network-cable-adapter-extender

They actually went and got the items I was looking for, hooked them up and continuity tested them to make sure they worked together for me while I was on the phone. I like it.

Now to find out if the ethercon cable I ordered does the trick. I'm hearing from users that it's very important to have STP - shielded twisted pair - cable for this application but specs for a lot of these items is somewhat scarce. I ordered a cable from GearIt. $50 for 50 feet. It's the same cable they include with their snake boxes so hopefully it all pans out.

I hope to do some charitable recording and streaming at the local Jazz Festival (all the revenues fund education programs) in the coming months and this will make it lots easier to get onstage mics run to an out of the way location without hauling a tote full of XLR cables.

Thanks for sharing all the detail and links. I'm going to try something similar this year.   

[voltronic]

I'll be curious to hear how this turns out. I've been on the fence about getting one of these type of snakes versus making my own 4 channel snake with Mogami / Redco cable.

[Patrick]

I use these things a fair amount, sometimes running 300ft+ of Cat 5 cable from stage to FOH for instance.  Huge time saver and can save the day.  One unnerving thing about them is when they fail, they can fail spectacularly especially when phantom power is involved. Since all 4 lines share a common ground, if the ground conductor is compromised, there goes all 4 of your signals at once
For mission critical signals, I usually include a spare cat 5 line to those boxes so we can swap it over just in case

I suspect in install applications where the cat 5 is being run through a stud wall and terminated to two wall plates, there is way less chance for damage than in a touring situation where you're unwrapping and wrapping it up twice a day

[goodcooker]

So after a couple of hiccups I got this up and running today. Set up four phantom powered mics with my SD Mixpre6 and everything is working as expected.

Using this 50 foot cable - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTV5ZZ41?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1 from GearIt. $50. It's cheap and kinda feels like it. It has a pretty robust rubber jacket and that's what I wanted since I'll likely be taping it to the floor in some spots or using it on stage where it could get stepped on. For $1 a foot it's worth trying it out. Looking further there's cheaper cables from GLS and similarly priced ones from ProCo. I ended up with the parts to make another so I might try a different cable for the next one.

Long story short - I ordered a input box with female jacks and an output side with cables from Seismic Audio. See the links I posted a few comments up. They mistakenly sent me two of the input side instead and one of those two was a two pack so I have 3 input boxes. I emailed them and said I would order another output box if they let me keep the extra input. Made sense so they sent me two output boxes with 3 foot XLR cables. They are in Memphis and it was all iced up for several days and it took them a while but I got the stuff today.

This is probably not a cheaper solution than a typical snake but it's modular and probably weighs much less than most of them. I'm in for $125 for a 50 foot four channel. I like the idea that I can have more than one cable and attach them with a small light weight coupler if needed.