Replacing Splitters with Digital Snakes

[James_uclan]

Hello again, I've been away studying up on audio snakes since the last time I was in this forum, and although they now make sense to me theres one thing I guess must be available, yet I have either missed it or it does not exist. Surely, as the signal is converted from analogue to digital, a number of fibre connections would be provided on the base unit so that the digital signal could then be sent to multiple mixing desks. This would bypass the need for expensive splitters as well as minimising the amount of excess clutter on the stage from microphone splitters. Another option I've considered is that the audio could be sent from the line outs provided on the mixing desks, one again eliminating clutter on stage, however I assume this would cause to much clutter in the gallery, whilst also being unreliable due to the possibility of a mixing desk shorting out and thus audio feeds on the other desk also being lost. Once again, I'd be interested to hear everyones thoughts and opinions on the subject. All the best, James.

[bishopthomas]

A digital snake is not going to replace the need for a copper splitter for remote recording. You won't always be interfacing with digital consoles, plus there are so many different types of digital snakes they are almost proprietary to specific consoles. Also, there is only one set of preamps so someone will have to be in control of these settings. You'll want to be that guy, but so will the house crew.

Digital snakes are great because they're lightweight, can be run long distances, elliminate noise picked up from long runs or EMI, etc. I plan on going digital (MADI fiber) with my next rig. But I will still need a splitter to hit first.

[surflounge]

Aphex makes solutions for that:
www.aphex.com

[fifthcircle]

Depends on the technology you're using. If you are running a snake that is based off of Ethersound or CobraNet, you can in fact use the snake as a splitter. The problem is that most consoles don't have gain tracking built into those protocols. One person is the specified master and the other folks are nodes on a network. They get the signal, but cannot control it.

Some of the newer digital consoles have gain tracking between boards built in so that monitor/recording/foh split one stage box and everybody can make their independent mix without affecting the others.

--Ben

[James_uclan]

Thanks guys, I've just noticed that I did actually download an article about WhirlWind USA's E Snake a while ago which performs the same function, it's just i've looked at so much other stuff since then I'd lost it far back in my logs! I'm assuming that the hardwired splits and analogue outputs referred too in the article;

"4 ESFs [e snake frames] configured for additional broadcast and recording feeds with hardwired splits or

analog outputs" (http://www.whirlwindusa.com/ftp/esnake/esnaart.pdf, page 9)

relate to Neutrik XLR / Line inputs and outputs?

If somebody could confirm this i'd appreciate it greatly,

James