PNW AES CAT Workshop Seattle June 1
Background:
After an incident at that same bluegrass festival, I posted a subthread here about how I pulled on a kinked and squeezed Belden Data Tuff CAT5e cable and got a burst of white noise from the PA, which stopped when I stopped and started again when pulled again and stopped again when I stopped pulling.
Following some discussion here, I set up in the shop to try to get it to do it again, and succeeded once and failed several times. That was followed by further discussion, and a post by Victor in which he analyzed CAT5 cable in several distressed states with a cool Fluke analyzer, and the cable always did what it was supposed to do, despite the abuse.
Then we learned from Behringer that they had always told us to use shielded CAT cable, despite quotes from their various manuals that said no such thing. Then I shut up here for a while, but was not entirely inactive.
I realized that I knew a couple of people who could be helpful in resolving the questions raised in this exploration:
A. Steve Lampen, Belden's preeminent Product Specialist, has done other meetings for us and is super-knowledgeable and happy to share and is interested in this problem as it is out of his ordinary;
B. There is a guy who I don't want to name yet who comes to our AES meetings and who works for Fluke, which was founded and is headquartered 10 or 15 miles from where I write. Unfortunately, he works for a different Fluke branch than the one that makes the cool analyzer, but he tells me he's willing to help find the right person or people in the data division who could help us.
Workshop Preliminary Announcement:
To try to resolve the problem of what's going on, my Section of the AES is going to sponsor an all day workshop in Seattle on Saturday, June 1, from something like 10am to the later afternoon, with an option to continue into the evening if we find something interesting. It will be free and open to anyone who wants to come. It will almost certainly be in downtown Seattle in a specific place, but our venue contact doesn't want us to name the location until some final details are worked out. Despite that, the location seems certain, and I'll announce the location ITT. (There are many restaurants nearby, and at other workshops we've done we've gotten takeout so we could continue our discussions.)
For the record, there are non-stop flights to Seattle from both London and Copenhagen, and probably other places like that. Just sayin'. 8)~
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For those who are unable to ship themselves here, we will set up a non-zooming webcam via GoToMeeting, and you can participate there by sending me a PM of your interest and your email address. I will give this thread's participants a priority on attendance, as this is the finest resource available for the X32 IMHO, and you are a lot of smart people. There is a capacity of 25 on the Internet, and there will need to be a few places for AES members who are not in this thread. So first come, first served.
If you want to follow this on our website once we put an announcement there, you can go to
The Pacific Northwest Section of the Audio Engineering Society - Devoted to the Art and Science of Audio
(If you go there soon, you can read an obit on the home page of a friend of ours who had an extraordinary career at NYC's 30th St. Studio recording Tony Bennett, Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Cassius Marcellus Clay, and many, many more equally extraordinary and talented people, and who died here a couple weeks ago.)
Details:
Steve will be there with samples and some further resources.
Here is what I've planned so far:
It will be a combination lecture/roundtable/workshop where we learn about:
------1) The details of construction and transport in the various CAT cables;
------2) The differences between CAT categories (is that redundant?);
------3) The positives and negatives of shielding;
------4) How the integrity of the CAT transmission is measured;
------5) Whether or not it's possible to do a dynamic measurement to see effects of transient physical changes on the transmission process;
------6) If we can reliably create and recreate conditions under which the sync and/or transmission of data over CAT5e is interrupted between the X32/S16 combo;
------7) If the answer to "6)" is "yes", is that interruption limited to a specific brand or category or length of cable, or is it universal? Are some cables more immune than others?
------8) Also if the answer to "6)" is "yes", is the X32 especially susceptible to that interruption, or does it occur in other similar products as well?
The first 5 points will be covered in a lecture/roundtable format. Given the normal attendance at our meetings and at other AES workshops I've presented in the past, I expect a lot of smart, experienced people to come and contribute something of value. We will do our best to encourage people to come, and we have been previously successful at this.
Item 5: The cable analyzer Victor uses makes a static measurement, of a cable at rest, and it seems clear that this problem is a dynamic one that needs a measurement device that takes change over time into account. People I've talked to so far aren't sure that there is a measurement device yet that does this, but it seems that there needs to be in order to get a full understanding of what's going on.
For items 6 and 7, I'll have at least 5 X32/S16 work stations there, and a variety of cables in addition to the Belden Data Tuff on 2 of the X32/S16's. Steve and others will get some more cables to examine in a non-destructive way.
Depending on how many people show up, I think we can have at least 3 teams per work station, each team to be at least two people, teams distributed about 50' apart on the cable to avoid interfering with each other, with each team trying to pinch/pull/kink the cable and cause white noise and screen flicker on the consoles. As soon as white noise is heard, everyone freezes until we determine who was successful, then everyone else gathers around to observe the phenomenon so that they can then repeat it at their work station. Then perhaps we can answer "7)".
For item 8 we'll pull some strings to get other brands of local consoles. We'll see if we know the right people.
That's about as much as has been worked out so far. Your thoughts and suggestions are welcome.
Unfortunately/fortunately, I'm working like crazy the next few days and will not be online, so my replies will be limited or non-existent until probably Monday. I did want to announce this as far in advance as possible so you could adjust your travel plans....
Thanks,
Dan
