What are Digital Snakes

What are Digital Snakes

One of the best options available with Digital mixing boards is utilizing a Digital Snake. A traditional snake has multiple cables wound up in the cable jacket, is relatively bulky, and can be a pain to install. With Digital Snakes, you place the digital stage box on stage, plug in the Ethernet cable from the digital snake, and you’re done (maybe a little more to it than that, but easier than running a traditional snake). The significant limitation is that you cannot run Ethernet over 300 feet, but that’s usually not an issue. The main advantage is that you only need to run one Ethernet cable. See the diagram below.

While we are on the subject of “Snakes” and stage boxes, let’s review some basic information regarding “Traditional Analog Snakes” (usually referred to as a Stage Snake or Microphone Snake). Whirlwind is a very popular brand of traditional snakes (left image). When you think about purchasing a mic snake, the name Whirlwind will always come up in the conversation. These “traditional” mic snakes are still in use and will most likely continue to be utilized until the whole audio world switches over to Digital (which is most likely still a long time from now). They come in all lengths, but the standards usually include 25, 50, 100, and 150-foot lengths. The snake to the left is a 32-Channel snake with 24 Inputs and 8 Outputs (you can get these mic snakes in just about any configuration of Inputs and Outputs). As stated, these snakes are still in use, and even though they are somewhat bulkier than a single Ethernet cable, they are still reasonably easy to install. For now, you should make sure that you are familiar with all types of “Analog” equipment until the time comes when the “Digital World” completely takes over.