Audio wiring with punchdown.

[eadler]

We use Krone blocks for our studios with Wheatstone D- and Gen- consoles. Each studio has punch blocks behind a flip down piece of the desk with trunks run to punch blocks in the rack room. I don't recall the part #s of the wire used for the original install, but when I've added things (such as for our HDRadio upgrade with new processing and STL), I've used CAT-5e and a bunch of heatshrink (basically making a mini snake fan-out for the equipment) and punched them in series on the router in/outputs. Works great. (Note: I do not run audio 'both directions' on a single cat5e). We also run audio from our radio stations to our TV system in a different part of the building. I needed to mirror these runs for a test system, was easy to build 4x XLR > RJ45 and RJ45 > 4x XLR and run outputs of the DAs existing in the radio racks through one of my spare cat5e runs between the rooms to get to the TV equipment; I later used this same setup to get AES audio to my desk (simply patched the RJ45 from TV master, where the network patch bays all are, to the spare port above my desk, put the XLR cable there).

[davek]

We have kicking around our facility some diecast metal boxes with a RJ45 socket on the side and 4 XLR (2 male 2 female) connectors on top. They would have been made almost 10 years ago now and are absolutely indespensible! If I remember to I'll snap a photo and share...