Interspace Industries Audio Puck

The Audio Puck control unit and loom, pictured here with the forthcoming TAP‑CAT box that supports audio over Cat6/7 cables.

Does this box of tricks live up to its billing as the Swiss Army Knife of audio cables?

We’ve all needed some form of special ‘bodge cable’ to link one device to another because of non‑standard connections or incompatible interfacing, and most of us will have built up an assortment of adaptors and special cables. Interspace Industries aim to tackle this perennial issue with their new Audio Puck, which they claim can be configured into more than 90 different connection formats.

Achieved with just one compact switch box and a detachable connector loom, it also has options for balanced‑to‑unbalanced interfacing, stereo splitting, insert breakout, phantom‑power blocking, ground lifting, and more besides. It’s entirely passive, with no transformers: just wires, switches, and connectors. The Audio Puck was designed by a live‑sound engineer primarily for solving everyday live‑sound interfacing problems, but it’s obviously of use to anyone working with analogue audio who has a regular need to interconnect devices that aren’t directly compatible.

Overview

The control unit’s configuration switches are located in a protective recess, while the loom attaches securely to it using a DB25 D‑Sub connector.Housed in a strong metal case, the Audio Puck control unit measures roughly 82 x 79 x 42mm and weighs 200 grams, making it smaller and lighter than a typical DI box. The front panel carries a pair of combi XLRs and a pair of RCA phono connectors, while the rear has a 25‑pin D‑Sub connector for attaching the supplied cable loom (see ‘Loom Wiring Arrangements’ box).

A recessed trough on the top protects a trio of switches and a 3.5mm mini‑jack socket. Two of these switches are miniature toggles and select an Iso/Mono mode (of which more later) and a ground‑lift function. A larger, three‑way toggle configures the system for balanced, unbalanced, or stereo/insert modes. Most of the switch labelling is black on a white background, for easy legibility in dark situations, while the sockets and Iso switch have colour‑coded markings that indicate which cable groups and sockets carry which signals.

Supplied with the Audio Puck is a short (about 45cm) cable loom weighing around 460 grams. There are a lot of connectors in this loom, most being Neutrik types, and the control box end is terminated robustly in a 25‑pin male D‑Sub connector. The loom itself fans out into nine separate tails, each with a different connector, and with three different cable colours. There are two tails in the blue group, two in the green, and five in the red. The D‑Sub is wired to the AES59 (Tascam) standard, with each tail’s connection on its own channel. The only exception is that the left and right RCA phono connectors in the red group share a channel (there’s more about that in the box).

All connectors in the same colour group are essentially wired in parallel, but the different groups are linked (or not) to each other in various ways, depending on the mode setting on the control unit. The blue cable group is designated as carrying the left‑channel or insert‑send signals, while the green group conveys right‑channel or insert‑return signals. The corresponding combi XLR sockets on the control unit have the same coloured labels. In most modes, the larger red group effectively serves as the input or output connection set.

Obviously, colour coding is essential in identifying the different connector groups, and the designer told me he assigned the red, green and blue colours for “no rhyme or reason”. I’m sure regular use will bring familiarity but it has the potential to confuse some users: in the consumer world, the CEA standard uses white for the left channel and red for right, and my BBC training means I always associate red with left and green with right (as with navigation lights on planes and ships), so coping with blue and green felt a little unnatural. The control unit sockets being colour coded helps a lot, though, and if all else fails then a QR code printed on the base of the unit links directly to the full user manual online, which is a very thoughtful touch.

While we’re on the subject of the manual, it has 18 pages in total, though only...