(armored/rugged) dual Cat5e/Cat6

Hi!

Does anyone here have experience with dual Cat5e or Cat6 cables working with the iLive between 90-100mtr? I want to expand with and XDR at FOH as local rack, but I would love to have the cable be one solution, and not run 2 cables at festivals. If the cable has power or other lines it wouldn’t be a problem.

Pinanson has one, but I had a 50mtr dual cat5e with power and AES, which gave me QoS warnings constantly, and that was only 50mtr.

Now I’m on CAE audiolan 24, which is a perfect armored cable. But as said, I would really like to have it run in 1 cable.

Suggestions?

Regards, Tor

Sommer Cable has one, but don’t remember the name

SRV-AVB

R-72, iDR-16, xDR-16, Dante

Yeah, they have the monocat 202 or the power combis. But I was just hoping not to spend 2000euros on a cat cable [:smiley: ]

Canare have a new cable that is double sheathed for rugged applications, memory is its cat 5e not cat 6, I have not used it but most times Canare is amongst the leading cable in their field.

Cheers

Ok. But is this with Dual Cat5e lines or more? One line i snot enough :smiley:

How about using a fibre link split into V-Lans via switch at each end, I use 150m Neutrik fibre and two Level One gigabit switches and it provides 6 separate V-Lans for use with iLive, Lake, Sennheiser wireless manager, and a couple of spares.

Works great. Cost me about £1,000

That sounds like a possibly even better solution. Could you tell me more specific models/brands?

Regards, Tor

I believe Mr B uses the “network” sockets to connect up. I use ACE with fibre to connect an IDR48 with my T112. I mention this because I had problems with ACE over fibre. It turns out ACE uses 99.5% of the bandwidth on 100mbps switch and not all switches can handle total max load. I had a very expensive learning curve before settling on this:

It uses single mode fibre (not multimode fibre) and sends and receives all data on a single fibre (the multimode version requires one fibre for send and another fibre for return)

See also the document “understanding ACE over optical fibre” on the A&H site

https://www.allen-heath.com/UK/Products/Pages/CategoryDocument.aspx?CatId=iLiveSeries&SID=29

I use a gigabit switch for Dante (on a separate fibre) and I run a video feed down another fibre. (I have 150 metres of quad core fibre - 4 discreet lines in one cable the size of a microphone cable)

Check out my site for more about what I’m doing and why.

https://www.pealsound.co.uk/

IDR48 - T112 - Dante card

I use Sommer Cables SC-Monocat 212 and it is great (50 m). https://www.sommercable.com/3__produkte/3__030_meterware/3__500_0171_2.html Has power, 2 x shielded cat 6 (Ace,Dante), 2 x shielded twisted pair (use for audio, comms, Dmx etc). Very rugged outer casing and compact for the number of cables contained.

No problems at all with 50m length - has anyone else tried this cable with a longer run?

Cheers

Richard Howey

Audio Dynamite Ltd

IDR48/IDR16/T112/R72/Mixpad,Tweak,

Dual M-Dante/DVS, 17"MBP/Logic 9/Custom Mackie Control

Pealsound: Why use seperate fibres, when you can just use the V-LAN capabilities of most switches? A 1000-base SX fibre can manage 4,25gbit up to 150 metre. Plenty for 4 full gigabit VLANs, which can then be distributed at the other end. This could be done pretty cheap and lightweight!

The monocat is out of the question, price is way too high.

Interesting Jerry I had just made a bit of a mental note to do some testing with ACE over my fibre system for a series of upcoming jobs.

I have it in my mind (quite incorrectly I am sure) that ACE is slower to respond than the Ethersound + Network that I normally use.

I would have to make sure that Broadcast Storm and Spanning Tree is turned off on the Level One switches I use they seem to be pretty good and speedy. I also know that ACE does not like Gigabit links just good solid 100 base T. Like your use of 4 way fibre, very neat, sadly was not an option when I got my system but worth consideration if I upgrade, my other thought was to move up to 10Gb switches but that may be for another time also.[:smile: ]

So to understand you correctly Pealsound, you have 4 media converters on each end, which then takes up one single mode fibre each on you quad fibre cable?

Shouldn’t this all also be possible, with just a managed standard copper switch in each end? There should be plenty of bandwidth for 2 seperate ACE connections (one for surface, one for XDR link) right? As long as the ACE connection doesn’t see the others, and can be set to 100mb connection?

quote:
Originally posted by vilddyr

So to understand you correctly Pealsound, you have 4 media converters on each end, which then takes up one single mode fibre each on you quad fibre cable?


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Correct. In fact I have 3 sets of ethernet media converters and one composite video converter for my camera/tv monitor

quote:
Shouldn't this all also be possible, with just a managed standard copper switch in each end? There should be plenty of bandwidth for 2 seperate ACE connections (one for surface, one for XDR link) right? As long as the ACE connection doesn't see the others, and can be set to 100mb connection?

Yes in theory, but you should test the whole setup (it if you can) before you purchase.

IDR48 - T112 - Dante card