Hi All, With one particular band that I mix FOH for, we tour an R72 and iDR32 along with our own CAT5e reel. This makes our set up really quick and easy as we simply give the in-house guys a left and right output from our rack and we’re ready to go. We carry all our own mics and stands too. The whole band are on stereo IEMS so their world never changes and sound check times are kept to a minimum.

As you can imagine, this works really well on festivals where there are tight changeover times, and often only a line check.

Festival crews are wonderful people and most are obliging enough to let us have the use of a CAT5 run from stage to FOH or will even run it in especially for us. This makes things even easier for all concerned. On two occasions now though, we’ve had a failed connection with installed CAT5 (which was apparently working OK before) and had to place the mixer in the wings (we can work around this problem by mixing the show on iPad). Last weekend, three separate CAT5 cables failed to connect although our reel worked fine; is this a CAT5/CAT5e problem? I’ve always asked for ‘CAT5’, dropping the ‘e’ through sheer laziness I suppose, but is it really a critical point?

i gather that CAT5e can be connected as ‘crossover’ or ‘straight through’, could that be the problem?

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

Ade

T112, R72
iDR32, iDR48
iStuff