XLR Or DMX?

[icewolf08]

Yeah, but as the manufacturers still make there own DMX over Ethernet protocols, such as Strand's Shownet, ETC's Net3, ect, then chances are it will never happen.
So theoretically I could run Mono audio feeds back up DMX to pins 4 & 5?
Nick

In theory, yes. In reality, not, not at all. There are the reasons that have been mentioned, but there are many more. First of all, if you have any type of DMX splitting gear in your system, you won't be able to send audio too far. If you use network out of your console to nodes, you will only be able to get your audio signal as far as the nodes. You would need to build some kind of adapter box as the wire inside a DMX cable would not do to well if you just soldered on two connectors. What happens if there is a short in the cable and you cross audio with data? Well, in short, you are hosed.

In other words: BAD IDEA

 

[NickJones]

So what cool things can I use my wasted pins to do, I don't use any splitters, all our DMX gear has ins and outs, seems like a waste of pins!
Anyone use these pins? If so for what?
Nick

 

[dramatech]

wasting 2 pins in a DMX connector is not the greatest sin in the world, but if you just have to use them, make an adapter so that you can take the second universe from your board, if you have one, and run it down the second set of wires. In that way you have some isolation for different DMX toys, movers or scrollers. If your board is of the elation/Express/Insight family, you can go to setup selection 2 (output configuration) and change the 2nd universe to be 1-512, and now you have a two output splitter. If you don't understand how to make the adapters for both ends of the cable PM me.

 

[KeeperoftheKeys]

You could send a second universe down the second pair.
You do need to check that pins 4 and 5 are connected on all in line devices as they were sometimes not even connected from in to thru on older equipment.

 

[TimMiller]

Avo uses pins 4-5 for their second universe. Also, pular and claypaky used to send 24V down the line to power up consoles and such through pin 5. I had to pull apart all of our claypaky gear and disconnect that because it was causing all sorts or bad problems, especially when an Avo console was plugged directly into a clay paky. I would make the buss driver shut down in the console, and cause all sorts of weird data glitches, especially with the first fixture in the line. I have used balanced mic cable lots of times for DMX with no problems. All of my cable is high quality though, i have run into some issues with some really cheap crap but i ran into the same issues with the 5 pin cable from the same company. Also I once had the audio guys steal my 3 pin DMX cable. They were getting all sorts of weird hums and buzzes. They kept on blaming the cable, until i walked up and said something. I wasnt very happy.....

 

[renegadeblack]

As has been mentioned, it is possible, keep in mind however, that you will need to be careful about sending it down with an audio snake because you might get a buzz or something. I had that happen in middle school because we didn't have a booth where we had our equipment for shows so we setup FOH and we sent the light board down the snake with the audio and we'd get a buzz in our audio feed for our videotaping.

 

[Slitterst]

So theoretically I could run Mono audio feeds back up DMX to pins 4 & 5?
Nick

Theoretically. However, the DMX-512A standard specifies what is permissible on pins 4&5. If you were to try this and send some errant voltage to devices that aren't expecting it, you could well end up frying some equipment.