Apollo Studio Cabling (Part 3)

A lot of cabling was done last week in my new studio. Here you see 4 UTP cables sticking out the cabling guiding system. They are all mounted now on an in internal connector. You can see a lid that I can lift and under there are now 4 UTP connections and two power connections. In total 5 of these connection boxes are distributed through the studio. Very convenient. I'm looking now for stuff to transport over UTP next to normal network connections of course. So far I found KVM, USB, DVI, HDMI, analog audio, SPDIF and ADAT over UTP. So that should be sufficient I guess :)

Here you see where all the UTP cables come together. This is one of the lower cabinets of my main desk. Here I now have 14 UTP cables going to the rack in the server room and also 20 UTP cables going to the connection boxes in the studio. The white patch panel I use to cables stuff that is mounted in the main desk itself. In this cabinet you see also two strips of power switches. They are used to switch also the power in the connection boxes now. I did decide to divide the power on the left and right side of the studio, so I have two of these power strips on the right side of my desk as well.

The power for the whole studio is coming now by the way from an 3000 VA UPS mounted in the server room. It is enough to power the whole studio in case of a power failure. It also protect the studio from wrong power (too high or too low). The power from the server room is mounted now on two of these boxes that are behind my main desk. One is on the right and one on the left. This is basically the main power distribution running to the power strips with switches that are in the previous picture. So by now I'm completely done with the power cabling. Every piece of equipment has power now.

To connect the equipment in the upper cabinets in the main desk I mounted a lot of power strips up side down under the main desk. They all connect to one of the switches. In this way I can switch equipment on and off in groups. Very nice. I tried to divide everything into logical groups that I often use together. The biggest job by the way is that I made all cabled exactly in the right length. I cut of the normal power connector from all the strips and replaced them with female euro connectors that go directly into the power strips with the switches. It has cost me a lot of time, but I'm very happy with the end result.

Meanwhile I started cabling midi in the studio. Quite a hard job since behind the lower cabinets it is quite dark and some connectors are in small places. I have to hold a flashlight in one hand for this and try to put in the connector in with my other hand, usually laying on my back. Ah well that is life ;) As you can see in the picture it can be a bit crowded and then still there has to go audio cabling in as well.

Some of you wonder why the cabling is taking me so long. Well there are two reasons for that. The first is that it is a lot ;) The second is that I still have to do other stuff in between as well. So I cannot work on it constantly. Besides that I usually test everything I connect right away to be sure it is installed correctly and not that I will have to do trouble shooting after wards and maybe not be able to reach the faulty cable as easy anymore. I'll continue with this next week.