What Would I Need for This?

doncolga


Hey,

Haven't posted here in a while...nice to be back.  I've got my music room upstairs and this basically acts as the control room.  I have five other rooms upstairs, two very close, and three on the opposite side of the house.  I'd like to have a mic (or two) and a headphone line (or two) available in each room.  Do you all have any suggestions on the best way to do that?

Thanks!

Donny

Hire someone to pull the wires to the other rooms. You will need a headphone amp with the number of outputs you need and enough mic inputs. If you don't plan to use them all at once you can simply patch them as needed.  Markertek dot com is a good resource for parts and cable.

Hi Donny I can give you a strategy:

1     Decide which rooms are going to get the studio link and locate a suitable place in each room for a small box to be mounted.

2     Each box needs say 2 balanced inputs, 2 heaphone circuits and perhaps a 75 ohm coax. I would run an extra cable for an intercom system. (maybe cat 5 etc as well)

3     Enough cable has to purchased and all the cabling installed from the room box points to a central point in the main control room. ie behind main patch bay. Cable journeys would range from inside walls, under floors, in roof etc Try to conceal all cabling and avoid using conduit if you can.

4     The connectors for the boxes are purchased and mounted on the lids. Cables are terminated at each wall point to sockets mounted on lid.

5     Cabling at patch bay end is terminated. Headphone feeds may be hard wired to suitable multiple headphone amp. Intercom cables can be stored away for future. Video feeds could terminate on a single patch panel.

6     Mic inputs from rooms could terminate in a non normailised patch row so patching to mixer inputs would be easy.

Testing of all signal cables while lids are still not screwed onto boxes. If all checks out lids are fitted.

You may want to consider more than two balanced lines as well. ie 4 to be on the safe side.
You might want to send a mike and DI signal from one instrument and something else as well. (in stereo etc)

Its all a great idea. Having separate spaces with different reverb characteristics can be very useful in recording situations. Sounds like you will get excellent islolation if you need it with a complex or large ensemble all at once.

Video links would be good for setting up cameras in required rooms and sending a video signal into the control room for monitoring on some sort of small screen. A spare computer could do a split screen view of all the spaces at once. The spare cables could even be used to send a talkback mic signal from each of the rooms mounted on the ceiling for ease of communication.

There is a fair bit to do if you want to do it well and you may need to hire people to help you with various stages. Cost it all out too. Good luck.