Cheops' Law of cable building

[mdlbear]

Everything takes longer and costs more.

Today it was mostly "takes longer". It took much longer than I expected to put the mic stands back where they belong, clear a space for the computer, shut down and disconnect the computer in the office, and bring it back up in the bedroom studio.

Then it took a lot longer than I would have liked to get the Cat6 cable run back in operation. It didn't work when I installed it -- I figured (correctly, as it turned out) that the problem was screwed-up plugs. I ended up cutting off both ends' plugs and connecting them to a patch panel on the office end, and a modular jack in the garage attic. Naturally this required several tests, each of which meant a round trip up and down the garage stairs. Par for the course.

This freed up the the old Cat5 run I'd been using, leaving me free to use it as I'd originally intended: to run audio for editing, so I don't have to waste two hours moving the box the next time. It took longer than I expected. Surprise. And I wasn't expecting the sound quality to be particularly good, but I wasn't expecting nearly as much 60Hz hum as I ended up getting, either. Not nice

(A few minutes later) An isolation transformer (Furman ISOpatch) helps a lot. And I'll be the rest of the problem is caused by the fact that there are two independent paths for what is really the same ground. (A few minutes later) Maybe not: shorting the two grounds at this end doesn't seem to help, and I know they're shorted at the other end. I may just be stuck with it for now.

If I had real differential signals this probably wouldn't be a problem. At least now it's down to the point where it's not really noticable when I'm actually editng. So I could edit now, except that I'll need to go to bed soon.