I’ve been wanting to put this up for comment for a long time, but didn’t have a place to upload a picture. My thanks to the AVS Forum for providing that capability (hope they don’t mind my using it here – I checked the FAQ and didn’t see anything prohibiting posting pictures to other Forums).
I built three of these back in ’96 for my system, which is housed in three cabinets of your typical entertainment center. Because the amount of equipment necessitated so many cables passing back and forth between the cabinets, I needed a way to minimize the bundles and substantially cut down on “cable real-estate,” as it were.
The cable is a pro-audio-grade snake. If you’re not familiar with "pro audio speak," "a snake" is a cable used to carry lots of individual signals (typically over a long distance) in a compact package. This is accomplished by using very thin jacketing on the internal single cables, with a heavy jacket overall. It’s the stuff they use at concerts to carry all the signals between the stage and the mix position. At the sound company I used to work for we also used it in studio installations. Snake cable stock comes in a variety of capacities, ranging from 4-channel to 48 or more.
My particular cable is an oxygen-free, 8-channel Mogami, which I configured as four stereo pairs. The connectors are Dayton Super RCAs from Parts Express (which are the beefiest RCAs I’ve found for the price). I used colored 3M electrical tape under clear heat shrink for ID purposes.
Notice that the break-out is longer on one side than the other. The short side is for the receiver end (center cabinet), since all the connection jacks are in close proximity. The other end is the equipment side; the longer breakout length allows room to spread out to reach the necessary pieces in the cabinet.
When it was all said and done I had only two cables providing service for all the audio signaling in the cabinet with the source components: One of the cables did the tuner, CD changer, and (audio) ins and outs of a VCR. The second cable handles the ins and outs of a CD recorder and the input signal to the amplifier, with a spare pair available for future use.
Only one cable was needed for the other cabinet that houses processing gear (equalizers, crossover, remote controller for sub volume).
The only real downside to this approach is that once the overall outer jacket is stripped back, the jacket of the individuals is very thin and somewhat fragile. Something like a screwdriver could easily gouge right through it, so you have to be a little careful with it. Still, I haven’t had any failures in the 8 years I’ve been using them (knock on cheap Formica
).Naturally, I had to also run separate cabling per-component for video - didn’t feel up to the challenge of making one of these with S-video connectors!
Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt
