John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

Hi
I am at the construction phase of my studio build and trying to put together a wiring/ cable plan and getting a bit confused.
The studio consists of Control/ mixing/ tracking Room, Live Room A and Live room B.
My plan is to run 16 channel multicore from the Control Room to Live room A wall plates... 10 of these channels will be for mics (xlr) and 6 for headphones (1/4" inserts), There will be a similar setup running from Live room B...
Question, is it ok to have the microphone and headphone signals running within the same multicore. In the control room what do people do with the multicores returns, are they connected to wall plates or left loose with just the connectors for easy access?

I am planning on using Redco TGS-16 16 Channel Snake Cable
http://www.redco.com/shopexd.asp?id=459

Anything I should know about making up these multicores, can someone direct me to a good tutorial on putting together studio multicores, i am a novice at soldering but eager to learn?

I am also planning on running heavey gauge speaker cable from sovtec guitar head to 2 x 4x12 cabs in the live room, ethernet cable and firewire cable. Will i need 4 different cable conduits (plastic pipe) 1 for xlr mic cable, 1 for headphone cables, 1 for digital data cables and 1 for speaker cables...?

Thanks for taking the time to read my post and all advise welcome

hally

Hally,

I would suggest running your 4 different conduits to each room separating each type of signal. Its never good to run power next to mic lines. And as far as digital/data lines I have seen some very weird things with digital lines if they are not separated as well.

As far as terminating the cables in the control room the options you mentioned are done all the time. Its really how you want it to look and function. I have done control rooms with will plates and small snakes then to the console. I have done rooms with everything direct to the patch bays, same goes for everything running to punch down panels. Its all really how you want it to function and look.

Dave