Don’t bother. If you’re retrofitting into an existing fixture it means your ballasts are probably old and shitty, which means you need to replace the ballasts, which means you’re better off with low voltage tubes and drivers, but your fixtures are trash too and need to be rewired and have the lamp holders replaced, so now your labor bill is higher than if you’d just bought new fixtures. Just buy new fixtures.

Adam P wrote: Mon Jan 30, 2023 7:28 pm Don’t bother. If you’re retrofitting into an existing fixture it means your ballasts are probably old and shitty, which means you need to replace the ballasts, which means you’re better off with low voltage tubes and drivers, but your fixtures are trash too and need to be rewired and have the lamp holders replaced, so now your labor bill is higher than if you’d just bought new fixtures. Just buy new fixtures.

This.

Fwiw you can use low voltage LED lights and dim them yourself and they’re dead quiet. I’ve done this a fair amount building sets for TV shows where noise is not allowed in the slightest. You can dim them, too, using low voltage DMX dimmers, which you can also then control using a minimalist box like a DMX King so then it’s like, press one button and switch to full bright, press a different button to have some at 30% and some at 50% for more of a mood, etc.

For sure run the CAT5 (I would go CAT6 or maybe even shielded CAT7, for the future) for audio, network, or whatever else. Run that shit all over, home runs back to a central closet somewhere.

Carlon makes corrugated flex conduit, it’s worth running a 2” tube or two from a control room to a live room. That way you can run the thing you’re not thinking of right now, or the thing that hasn’t been invented yet, or whatever, without ripping up walls later. Go crazy and run one up to the attic and one down to the basement and wherever else.

Maybe I missed this upthread, but consider facemounted boxes and conduit, rather than punching twenty more holes through your drywall layers and then wondering why so much sound is bleeding out/into this garage. Otherwise, careful detailing, and if you can hire someone to run a blower door test, you'll find those leaks.

Bubber wrote: Tue Feb 14, 2023 5:25 pm Maybe I missed this upthread, but consider facemounted boxes and conduit, rather than punching twenty more holes through your drywall layers and then wondering why so much sound is bleeding out/into this garage. Otherwise, careful detailing, and if you can hire someone to run a blower door test, you'll find those leaks.

This is a good line of thought. Sound travels through air. Escaping air is escaping sound.

For my project lubing romex and pulling it through conduit was too laborious. The compromise was puncturing the drywall just enough to get the cable leads through then wiring with surface mounted boxes. It worked well.

I'm nearing the point of running my Cat cabling and closing up my wall. Curious about the specifics of which type of cabling folks would suggest. Mostly I'm imagining using it for audio inputs or speaker cable runs, plus possibly to hook up headphone mixers, ala the Furman HDS-6 system. The conundrums I've encountered are:

1.) Shielded vs unshielded: My sense from reading about various applications of Cat cabling is that mostly it's fine to use unshielded. But some uses, particularly where phantom power needs to be run, require shielded. My thought was to run mostly unshielded with a couple shielded cables going from my control room to live room, but is there an argument to skew more toward shielded? It seems a bit more complicated to crimp yourself but otherwise only a minor extra hassle.

2.) Cat5e vs Cat6: Other than the small bit of cost saving, is there any reason not to just use Cat6 for everything? It seems like it's backwards-compatible and will have plenty of bandwith for anything I'll ever do in a medium-sized recording studio.

3.) How much to run: I was loosely thinking of doing one cable for every four channels of audio I want to be able to connect in any given section of the live room. Plus a couple extra cables for video, a possible Dante-like network, that kind of thing. Basically just trying to future-proof for crazy ideas I haven't thought of yet. I'm worried I might overkill it, but is there any argument for running even more than that?

Thank you all for focusing me on Cat cables in the first place - I'm psyched to be able to run them all before my wall gets closed off.

I am not an audio engineer, but I masquerade as a network engineer by day (glorified router fixer) and there is no reason to run cat5 over cat6 in the connected world I live in. I can't imagine you'll run into any issue where you will wish you had cat5 in that wall.

Yeah, if it were me, I'd just go w/ Cat6 and call it good. Unless you're doing a huge buy and a lot of long runs (which it doesn't sound like) it's worth the 10-20% more for the higher-spec and piece of mind. It's not like it doubles the cost.

If you do end up doing something with higher data density down the road, this will potentially save you some headaches and having to re-wire it later w/ higher spec.

I wouldn’t run speaker-level audio over category cable.

worriednote wrote: I'm nearing the point of running my Cat cabling and closing up my wall. Curious about the specifics of which type of cabling folks would suggest. Mostly I'm imagining using it for audio inputs or speaker cable runs

Adam P wrote: Fri Mar 17, 2023 1:36 pm I wouldn’t run speaker-level audio over category cable.

OMG good catch Adam!!!
DO NOT DO THIS - If you want to have heads in one room, cabinets in another, do separate, dedicated high-gauge speaker cable runs for this app...and shorter=better. Cat5/6 is some REALLY thin cable and you really should not send enough power to drive a loudspeaker or guitar cabinet over it.

Adam P wrote: Fri Mar 17, 2023 1:36 pm I wouldn’t run speaker-level audio over category cable.

+1