Apollo Studio Cabling (Part 5)

I though it would be nice to show you some more pictures of my cabling job so far. In the pictures on the left you see the back of my Friend-Chip DMX32. On the left of it are all the SPDIF connections running to my digital synthesizers. Most of the ports are optical and some are coaxial. You can also see the Word Clock connection on the BNC T-connector there as well and on the right you see the ADAT connections that are also optical. Above this DMX32 is also a DMX12 that I'm not using yet. This one will be only used to convert some SPDIF connections from coaxial to optical. Below the DMX32 is also a DMX16 that I use to hook up my digital Sound Effects equipment.

On the right is a picture of the right side of the back of my main desk. I showed you pictures of that before, but these are a bit more crowded as you can see. You can clearly see two of the hooks that I use to guide the cabling with. As I explained before I don't tie cables up any more, since that only makes it more difficult to remove or reroute cables later. Most cabling you see here is still only the digital cabling. I just started with the analog audio cabling very recently. The only thing working on that part is the monitoring part (the output) at this moment. Though it looks like a mess it is actually very organized :) I know exactly what everything is and where it is going to.

Here you see another picture of the left part of the back of my main desk. Here you can see the guiding system even a bit better. As you can see there is already quite come cabling in there. And there is more to come, but most of that wont go over these paths but more from the bottom 19'' cabinets into the studio. Last week I tested all the digital connections and everything seems to work perfectly. It was nice to finally hear some sounds coming from my main studio PC and also to test the new Sound Effects units that I acquired after I tore the studio down upstairs.

In the picture on the right you see the back of one of the lower cabinets of the main desk. My furniture builder Gerrit also mounted some 19 inch profile on the back (just 8 HE) where I installed some patch panels now. I can connect synthesizers and AD/DA converters with short audio cables to these patch panels and then run multi-cables from there to the Islands I build. The advantage of multi-cables is that they are 8 cables bundled in one bigger cable and that makes less of a mess and is easier to install of course. I use these to travel distances of about 5 meters.

I didn't want to spare you a nice shot like the picture on the left either :) Again it looks like a mess, but it isn't ;) Well I hope this gives you an idea what I have been doing the last weeks and also why it is taking so long. It is a lot of cable and most of it has to be put in places where it is not easy to reach. What you see here is only the inter-cabinet cabling and there is also a lot of cabling inside the cabinets, but that is a bit difficult to show on the pictures. Last week I also tested all my AD/DA converters and now it is time to hook up the synthesizers and other equipment with analog outputs and inputs up to those :)