Hello chappies,

Is anyone here using digital multicore at present? I've been half looking at the roland digital snake which works over cat5 cable. I know there's other systems that are madi based but as far as i know there outside of my budget. I have to admit i'm a bit nervous about using cat5 cable as a multicore, it seems so flimsly compared to regular analogue multi!!

Anybody have any good or bad experinces they wish to share?

Geoff

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right.........

There's a lot of useful info on the Roland digital snake system, plus the alternative options in this thread.

Very much worth a gander.

i've had no personal experience of one just worked at festivals that have used them, as cat5 cables are very cheap incomparison to a multicore they ran 2 just incase one went and it was dug into the ground and then left it there, this was a yamaha one used for the yamaha desks, seemed perfectly stable and had no faults.

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Live Sound and Studio Engineer

i'm looking at the Brick-Worm system for festivals with my analogue desk. if Chris can show me a reliable system with less noise and better fidelity than 50m of multicore then i think i'll buy a couple of systems for this summer.

i think i'll want a bespoke package in a rack, but i might use a couple of "Bricks" to patch holes for the festivals. we'll just have to see what FOH, monitor world and recording splits will cost.

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planet nine
lincoln, uk.

I've used a number of remote stage box systems including Muxipaire, Nexus, Sony SIU, Studer D21m and, of course, the Roland Snake.

All the others are much more expensive than the Roland (The SIU is discontinued. We don't really use Muxi anymore as the ones we have are unreliable). We've got 3 Snake kits, and they're (so far) as reliable as anything else. It's the cables that fail rather than the boxes. We use a flexible form of Cat5 that doesn't twist like the installation cable, and we always carry 4 per system - REAC main, REAC spare (both plugged into the active system) and replacements for each. The main issues are operational ones:

Unlike the other systems mentioned, the Snake has no routing matrix. What comes in on Chan 1 goes out on Chan 1.

The Remote Box ( controls a single channel and can step through channels sequentially so that you can switch on phantom/adjust gain and so on) is fine but clunky. There is a Windows front end, but it's REALLY clunky. Reminds me of Win 3.1 - you can only ever see the first two letters of a channel's name and things can get really obscure if you have, for example, a lot of vocals you'd like to describe. This isn't impossible to work with, you just have to work out your own nomenclature and stick with it. Roland seem keen to develop this side of things though. You can, happily, save snapshots so if, for example, you're doing a festival and have the luxury of a soundcheck(!) you can save each band set-up... best to keep channels reserved for particular sources, though.

In short, there are some drawbacks, but they're easy enough to live with if you don't need to do lots of source switching via matrix, or are prepared to do physical patching... and you're happy that you have only 32 sources per crate.

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Second in a one horse race...