Studio Transition

[craigb]

24 minutes ago, John Vere said:

So right now I have no ceiling. 

Wouldn't the gear get wet during rain storms??? ?

 

?

[John Vere]

59 minutes ago, craigb said:

Wouldn't the gear get wet during rain storms??? ?

 

?

It’s Canada. We don’t ever get rain, just snow. Dry snow here. 

[Tim Smith]

On 2/1/2022 at 7:24 PM, John Vere said:

In the 90’s I had a real studio that was 1,000 square feet and had 2 isolated rooms with special windows and double doors and a W window between the live room and the control room. 

In our last house I had 600 square feet of attic with a 12’ angled ceiling that I shared with family storage of random stuff like extra furniture and dog crates.

New home I’m in the basement in a standard 12x12 spare room with a 7’ 6” ceiling. The former owner had put a plywood sub floor and the walls are covered with OSB ( chip board). it’s the only room that was sort of finished in the basement. I had to remove the ceiling which was pine planks to complete the renovation of plumbing and wiring upstairs. So right now I have no ceiling. 
Like you I have way too much stuff for the small room. PA stuff 20 instruments in and out of cases, digital drum kit. Real drums, 88, 49 and 28 keyboards  sound modules, 4 old laptops, 3 computers 6 monitors and 6 suitcases full of wires and effects pedals. Extra mixing boards and interfaces, 10 pairs of headphones, A 10’ high stack of CD’s. 20 old hard drives most in enclosures, 3 boxes of computer parts, 12 mike stands, bass amp 3 guitar amps, couple of bags of lighting rig stuff. Then family stuff that still has no place to go from the 600 square foot attic.
 

All my summer shirts are hanging behind me. My extra shoes are here somewhere too. 

I’ve been renovating the house for 2 years and the upstairs is now finished. But we spent all the cash on that,  so my dream studio project needs a new plan.  
Does anyone need a room full of useless,  redundant music gear?  I’ll trade you for a new Computer and a Shure SM 7b. 

I’m hopefully going to get it done over the summer, but I have no where to put all this stuff so I can work on it. 

 

Hey John,

I don't come around here regularly.  Just seen this.

Good luck on getting it done.

I am going to look at all of the stuff I never use and probably sell it. I'm still set up in my dining room with my studio. The reno on the old studio is still ongoing to make it a bedroom. I had one more bunch of low voltage wires to re locate. Those wires will go into the basement through the outside wall. No drill I had would do it so I ended up buying a used Milwakee 1/2" right angle drill with a hole saw extension. I replaced a patio door in there. Due to rain water getting in around the old door I have to replace some of the floor too.The drill hasn't come in yet, so I have a very large hole in the wall.

 

[craigb]

I do hope you're going to clean that up!  Just get one of these after you fix things:

[Tim Smith]

Those are not Lan connections 

[craigb]

3 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

Those are not Lan connections 

Whatcha talkin' 'bout Willis?

Those are CAT6 connectors (RJ45's).

[Tim Smith]

 I mean my wires. 

I just put a wifi 6 card in my music PC. No need for cables. It's actually as fast as my wired connection was or maybe faster.

[sarine]

7 hours ago, craigb said:

Those are CAT6 connectors (RJ45's).

Cat 6 is a cable - not connector - standard. The same connectors (RJ45) can be used for many appliances (e.g. RS-485). Also, you can't easily distinguish between Cat 6 and Cat 5 without looking at the markings. From what the picture quality graces us with, the yellow ones in Tim's picture look like BNC to me. They have also been used for LAN but more notably A/V and RF signals, typical on radio equipment and high-precision electric measurement instruments, e.g. oscilloscopes. 

In my previous apartment I repurposed the in-wall LAN cabling and RJ45 sockets for transmitting analog audio from a Raspberry Pi stuffed into the entryway fuse box locker to the living room. It wasn't Hi-Fi but neither am I.

[craigb]

Next I suppose you're going to tell me I should use Plenum for inside wiring, ya? ?

[sarine]

8 minutes ago, craigb said:

Next I suppose you're going to tell me I should use Plenum for inside wiring, ya? ?

I had to look up what plenum means, but if you mean something like this then that's brilliant.

By the way, I didn't want to mention this in fear of upping my besserwissering, but there's a difference between a wire and a cable and I can't take it anymore. ?

[craigb]

And, just for the record, having wired several offices, I could argue that an RJ45 IS a CAT6 connector.  As in, a connector you put on the end of a CAT6 cable.  I might add that in any new wiring effort, anytime we see CAT5E (or worse) it gets removed and replaced with CAT6.  ?

Here is where my Plenum joke comes from.

[Shane_B.]

I used to have to run both depending on the business. I've installed a lot of it. I've installed a lot of cabling over the years for point of sales systems. When I started Panasonic used huge 5 pin din connectors. I got so good at soldering them I could strip the wire, tin it, bend it so it would line up perfectly with the solder connectors on the back of the plug, hold the plug and wire and solder in one contorted hand, and solder them with the iron with my other hand. And I'd get so in to it and moving so fast, I'd usually have to take desolder a few because I forgot to put the casing on the wire before I soldered the actual connector.

Then sometime in the early 90's we stopped selling Panasonic and went to Arba and CRS and they were just switching over to RJ45. I learned all about the differences between the ones made for solid wire, stranded wire, the ones made for both (they failed a lot), plenum, non-plenum, shielded, un-shielded. My neighbor who is an IT guy that runs his own business said he's never, not once, installed shielded wire and has never had a problem. Not worth the risk IMO but to each his own I guess and who am I to argue with a guy who is almost 60 and been doing this his entire career.

One of these days here soon I'm going to wire my house with CAT6. I was looking at enders and tools and they have RJ45's now that the wire goes all the way through and sticks out the front so you can see more clearly if you have a wire inserted properly and you don't have to worry about getting them all the way in to the end of the connector. The tool cuts the wire and crimps at the same time. I don't recall having access to anything like that back in the early 90's.

[Shane_B.]

On 2/21/2022 at 1:45 PM, Tim Smith said:

The drill hasn't come in yet, so I have a very large hole in the wall.

How do you go about fixing that? I ask because I recently discovered the California Patch method as they call it. You cut a scrap piece of drywall 4" wider all around than you need. Score and remove the drywall from the back leaving the front paper and a small filler piece of drywall to fill in the hole. You use the drywall paper as tape. It takes all the stress and frustration out of fixing holes like that. Here's a good vid on youtube with details on how to do it. I don't recommend using the premixed pink stuff for this kind of mud work because it's too thick. I watered it down and it worked ok but I went and bought a bag of the light compound because I had a lot more to fix and I had some skim coating to do. I just finished this remodel just before Christmas. That's primer on the trim in the last pic, that's why it's streaky and flat. There was an alarm system panel on the wall there and when I removed it I found that huge hole. It worked out because I could get in there to guide wire I had to run. There was only 2 switches in the box so I put in a new 3 gang box and added another switch and used all smart switches. The middle one is for the ceiling fan/light in the room. The original only had 1 hot wire so I had to go in the attic and build walkways across the floor joists and through the insulation to get to it and rewire the box with 14/3 w/g wire. I love doing this stuff. Wish we had an OT place here on the forum to talk about this stuff and show pics freely. I document all my projects and have tons of pics and video of the work I've done here at our place. Anyway, here's some before and after pics of the patch I did. You can't tell anything was ever there.

 

[Tim Smith]

The cable carries audio/video signals  WAY better than wireless. No batteries to run down. No connections to loose.

@Shane_B.

Thanks for those tips!

I have done a fair share of drywalling . I bought a very large patch for this hole. I will see if i can post pics of the progress when the drill comes in. If the hole is too large I'll just cut it back to the studs on both sides and then I can tackle it with mesh tape. That hole borders on being too large.

Biggest things most  beginners seem to do with drywall is they over apply the drywall compound or they over sand it. 

I think the pepto pink in this room is going too. Yuck.

Edited February 23, 2022 by Tim Smith

[sarine]

19 hours ago, craigb said:

And, just for the record, having wired several offices, I could argue that an RJ45 IS a CAT6 connector.  As in, a connector you put on the end of a CAT6 cable.  I might add that in any new wiring effort, anytime we see CAT5E (or worse) it gets removed and replaced with CAT6.  ?

Here is where my Plenum joke comes from.

You could argue, but the argument makes no sense. It's akin to calling your stove an "eggs in a teflon pan stove" - the stove doesn't care about the non-stick properties nor what you throw in it, even though there clearly is a contract between the two to interface with each other, and the coating was put on the pan to make the experience better.

As for Cat 5e vs. 6; there's probably not much difference (if any) difference at short distances (30m or 100ft) and normal living space environments. If I were doing permanent installations I'd want the best and for RF/EMF-noisy environments I'd want shielded, but for connecting your PC to your home router or the wall jack (home or office), practically Cat 5e = Cat 6.

[sarine]

7 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

My neighbor who is an IT guy that runs his own business said he's never, not once, installed shielded wire and has never had a problem. Not worth the risk IMO but to each his own I guess and who am I to argue with a guy who is almost 60 and been doing this his entire career.

Shielding is mostly a requirement in "noisy" industrial environments and maybe heavily bundled cablings where crosstalk could occur. The shields must be grounded properly or you could inadvertently cause current to flow between different ground potentials, create ground loops, or the antenna effect. Not really worth the hassle.