I very effectively killed my Sunday morning fixing one of our mic snakes. After testing all of our cables, I figured the snake was the likely source of problems we've been having lately, including the ever difficult problem of having signals make it back to the console that had abnormally low gain and more dynamics (everything sounded very muffled and quiet). For long enough now, enough of our audio operators had reported similar symptoms including myself and I figured it was time to lure some of the deeper rooted evils of our audio system to the surface.
What I found when I dove into the testing was that half of the snake was bad -- at least. The orange pieces of gaff show channels that had at least one conductor that had a high-impedance air gap problem. At this point, I thought it was just that the panel-mount connectors were faulty because most of the problems were with pin 2, so I figured it was a bad batch to start with that we've been putting up with because for a lot of things -- it works well enough (except when it doesn't).
I should take a moment to point out that this problem is so awful that normal troublshooting techniques didn't work. After swapping out mic's and cables on bad channels, we were running out of ideas. Either a lot of wiring in the wall was the problem or a lot of wiring in the snake was the problem, because switching channels on the snake didn't fix crappy sounding signals (given that there were 1:2 odds of picking another broken channel, which often was 10, 11, or 12 as they were what was left after setup. therefore they were always throwing us for loops when we couldn't find any way to make some given mic's suck a little less).
When I found when I went to pull the connectors off the ends though was that a monkey had clearly done the assembly of the snake. There's no strain relief, many of the wires had been stripped too harshly so where the entire wire should have been soldered, only a few strands of the wire remained, which though soldered, eventually broke off the connection for lack of strain relief. A couple channels had ground wires in contact with other pins, and I just loved realizing that though have the snake was already broken, the other half was so close to breaking that just disassembling the connectors and jiggling the wires was enough to break whatever was left.
I very quickly went from entering the building on a day off to fix a couple cables to unearthing some of the foulest evil our audio systems have encountered and subsequently resoldering an entire snake.
Also, the snake is off-brand. The logo on the side says DSP which isn't helpful in tracking down who made it, and the connectors have no names on them either, but I'm going to recommend to the higher ups that they purchase a bag of Neutrik's so that as these begin to fail (again), I can just replace them with something that actually has built-in strain relief and will be less problematic in the future.
What I found when I dove into the testing was that half of the snake was bad -- at least. The orange pieces of gaff show channels that had at least one conductor that had a high-impedance air gap problem. At this point, I thought it was just that the panel-mount connectors were faulty because most of the problems were with pin 2, so I figured it was a bad batch to start with that we've been putting up with because for a lot of things -- it works well enough (except when it doesn't).
I should take a moment to point out that this problem is so awful that normal troublshooting techniques didn't work. After swapping out mic's and cables on bad channels, we were running out of ideas. Either a lot of wiring in the wall was the problem or a lot of wiring in the snake was the problem, because switching channels on the snake didn't fix crappy sounding signals (given that there were 1:2 odds of picking another broken channel, which often was 10, 11, or 12 as they were what was left after setup. therefore they were always throwing us for loops when we couldn't find any way to make some given mic's suck a little less).
When I found when I went to pull the connectors off the ends though was that a monkey had clearly done the assembly of the snake. There's no strain relief, many of the wires had been stripped too harshly so where the entire wire should have been soldered, only a few strands of the wire remained, which though soldered, eventually broke off the connection for lack of strain relief. A couple channels had ground wires in contact with other pins, and I just loved realizing that though have the snake was already broken, the other half was so close to breaking that just disassembling the connectors and jiggling the wires was enough to break whatever was left.
I very quickly went from entering the building on a day off to fix a couple cables to unearthing some of the foulest evil our audio systems have encountered and subsequently resoldering an entire snake.
Also, the snake is off-brand. The logo on the side says DSP which isn't helpful in tracking down who made it, and the connectors have no names on them either, but I'm going to recommend to the higher ups that they purchase a bag of Neutrik's so that as these begin to fail (again), I can just replace them with something that actually has built-in strain relief and will be less problematic in the future.
