One thing about the CAT Box that I didn’t like was its lack of feet or a rubber under/side pad to prevent it from sliding around and/or scratching the stage floor. The CAT Box can also be used on its side, so the XLR cables lay flat for a clean look and to reduce tripping hazards. I didn’t encounter any applications where I needed to use it, but it is nice that it’s there. One CAT Box function not often found on most snakes is a small - thankfully recessed - switch for ground lift. It basically looks like a mini-stage box (and certainly could be used as such). In versions with four XLR terminations (male or female), the CAT Tails are $150 each.Īlso available are the SoundTools CAT Box stage boxes ($120/each), which use a rugged aluminum housing with RJ-45 jacks at either end (for in/out and parallel cable connections) and four male or female XLR jacks. The simplest iteration of the CAT Family system would be a single etherCON cable, two CAT Tails (one for each end of the “snake”) that are Cat-5/etherCON breakouts with a female RJ-45 receptacle that fans out to four 24-inch XLR cables. The WallCAT offers a simple installation solution. The wire has to be good quality - Rat Sound uses 26 AWG copper with quality shielding. The “secret” is the system requires a shielded interconnect cable that meets Cat-5e specs (or better). It’s essentially a straight-wire connection. The system is entirely passive - there are no electronics, buffers or amplifiers along the way. There are some limitations here - using the SoundTools CAT Family peripherals, a single Cat-5 cable can only carry four channels of balanced analog audio (including phantom power), or four AES stereo pairs, four com lines for 3-pin XLR-based (Clear-Com style) intercom lines or four (5-pin) DMX data streams. Although the products are based on Cat-5 cabling, this is not a routing or snaking system for moving/distributing Ethernet data, but rather using high-quality, shielded Cat-5/5e/6/7 lines in lieu of traditional audio snake cables. The latest addition to the SoundTools series is the CAT Family, a variety of snake items for use with shielded Cat-5/5e/6/7 lines, as well as two families of Cat-5e cables with Neutrik etherCON terminations. The CAT Rack puts 12 XLRs in a convenient rack package.
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