Receiving House rough multi length

[cedd]

Hi All

Those of you who tour (or work) in larger receiving houses, what's a rule of thumb front of house multi length that seems to work in most places you go? 

I'm just building up a new cat5 multi and have a lovely drum I could potentially wind it on to, but I've got about 7m more cable than will fit on it. Am considering cutting it down, and will if it doesn't make the difference between it being long enough or not! I've done this size venue before, but have always used existing cat5 runs. As my needs are growing I'm building my own loom to do the job instead. 

I'll probably be going mainly between front of house and the pit, although do sometimes end up with radio mics in stage right wing too. Depends on the theatre and show.  

[Gareth A]

All the tours I worked on that went to No1 houses the FOH loom from memory was 75M though that was the time of DMX rather than artnet. Though this was for lighting from Dimmer city > desk I guess if your adding in radio mics it wont be much less. 

From memory only one venue (not in UK) did we need to add a 10M extension on. 

[J Pearce]

70 or 75m is fairly common. 90m isn’t unusual for ethercon looms (leaving 5m for patch at either end within the 100m spec).

[neilalexrose]

100m covers all eventualities.

That said, Stage Sound Services send out 75m Yamaha multis (cat5, analogue xlr & mains) as a standard, and they wouldn’t do that if there were  going to be issues.  

But I guess it depends where your racks end up on stage. 75m is more than fine if racks are Downstage left in the venue I currently work at. But if they move too far upstage to clear the wing space, it might be a bit tight.

We’ve got to run our 100m drums of fibre upstage into the scene dock for the next show, which will be the first time we’ve done this. We’ll see how far they reach!

neil

[J Pearce]

27 minutes ago, neilalexrose said:

100m covers all eventualities.

Many suppliers won't send out 100m CAT5/6 multis as the patching inside the racks would push you over the 100m spec for ethernet (and thus dante). Yes it will almost certainly still work, but when it fails and the show gets pulled who's at fault?

[cedd]

Thank you all. 

I'll leave it at full length and come up with something better for the drum!

When I bought my desk from SSE many years ago, it came with a pair of 90m cat5's and it took me ages to work out the significance of 90 over 100. Felt like a really random length to have made them, until I remembered the 100m limit.