Home-brew, I doubt it would be cost effective.
Our theatre has absolutely no monitoring for the cast whatsoever, only a mic installed on the catwalk to get to the booth monitoring system. A few years ago, we got a baby monitor to put backstage so people in the greenroom can hear their cues, and get backstage in time for their entrance. Well that woked okay, but the audio level and quality wasn't great at all. People had trouble hearing their cues. I contemplated installing a 70V monitor system with a little 70V amp and speakers, but running new wire and buying the amp and speakers would be too great of a cost. And then the other day while I was thinking about it, I put two and two together, and the lightbulb went on.
About five years ago, the school was wired with an IDF in every room, numerous Cat 5 cables, and most importantly, TV cable coax. Last year, the school had a portable rack built that has a modulator, a mixer, a couple of wireless mics, and a DVD/VCR in it. The whole package is in an SKB portable rack. The modulator can be plugged into any coax jack in the school, and transmits whatever's plugged into it on one of the unused channels (can't remember off-hand, but I think it's 16).
Now here's where we can use it. A camera can be placed in the booth focused on the stage, and plugged into the video input of the modulator only. The sound from the camera won't go anywhere as it is useless (the actors don't need to hear our chatter about them ). An aux off of the TT24 (no problem with shortages there, there's 12 auxes) will go into the audio input of the modulator. The overhead mics on stage will be assigned to the aux pre-fader, and some of the other sources (i.e. wireless mics, MD and CD decks) will be assigned to the aux post-fader. The output of the modulator will be plugged into the coax jack in the booth.
We certainly don't have a shortage of TV's in our school...there's at least 10 of them on carts in storage. Plus, many of the school's remodeled rooms have A/V systems with LCD projectors, so teachers don't need the old TV carts anymore. A few of those TV's will be placed in strategic locations, such as in the green room and out in the halls and entrance lobby. They would all be tuned to channel 16 (or whatever it is), so everyone in the greenroom and out in the halls would be able to see the play, and hear the show audio.
Go ahead and tell what you think about it...and if you do something similar for a video monitoring system.
Matrix off of what kind of desk????????
In my situation, what we did, was plug into any old network outlet (all individually numbered) and unpatch the other end of the cable from the switch in the data cupboard, which also houses the RF network for the building, and plug it into a modulator. works like a dream.As far as video or CATV over CAT5, it is important to understand that most of the CAT5/UTP baluns and interfaces are not IP devices. They allow you to use CAT cabling in lieu of other cabling types, but they are still point-to-point systems and not made to run over networks. All you are doing is replacing an audio, video, RF or other cable with CAT5 cable. "Over CAT5/UTP" and "over a network" are two very different things and there are IP based streaming appliances available that do run over LANs and WANs, but they are much more expensive. Just a reminder as many people think they can plug some cheap CAT5 adapters into any RJ ports on their network and that's not how it works.
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