Cable Management

G

ggrantly

Veteran
Man, the topics that come up here.

So in my decent work-station, probably like most of you, I've got multiple wart sized gizmo boxes that connect by cable and most require power as well. Ad speaker wire, video support, back up drives, audio interfaces, mixer - controllers; yikes all the cables are like a pile of cooked pasta. I'm determined to fix this and plan to hang some Panduit trays in strategic locations.

Question:
Thinking about the cable runs in the Panduit trays; they are nice straight runs inclose proximity with varying voltages and signal types, with different shielding. It seems like a recipe for a problem. Can anyone give me some wisdom about the bad and how to avoid it. Of course this is the Audio Section, and that is my priority, making sure I don't have noise coming through the speakers.

TIA
Grant
 
Don't go looking for trouble in advance. If you have a problem then deal with it.
Thousands of installations of Panduit (or equivalent) ducts combine power, audio, video, RF, data, etc. with no problem.
 
In another life, I worked around boats that had lots of electronics and stereos also. Problems were all to common. And they were often difficult to find.

I guess I was seeing gremlins in the closet.

Grant
 
For years the standard advice was to cross power and signal cables at right angles and never run them together. I soon found out that every band taped their power cable to the snake of their PA or recording gear, and the only time I ever had a real leakage problem was when somebody took a short cut with a loop system, and laid twenty feet of it inside a plastic bit of ducting for 'aesthetic' reasons. Even modern multicores are pretty well screened so that you can shove data down one pair without that leaking. Noise from lighting dimmers is often blamed for interference, but realistically, it's usually grounding issues that let the noises in, not cable runs close to audio ones. I agree totally with Richard - put the cables in and then deal with any problems afterwards.
 
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