I've only used a snake once, at the HotHouse in Chicago. I ran my stage mics to the stage-end of the snake, the engineer pulled the corresponding ends running from the snake to the board, and instead of plugging them into the board I plugged them into my mic cables (which obviously ran to my R4) and applied phantom with the R4. I also took a pair of SBD XLRs into channels 3&4, directly from the board, no phantom.