Once my clients has a rather large lighting installation. 10 TrackSpots, 16 Mighty Scans, 3 scorpion lasers, neon dance pole, 2 accu spots 300. 8 LED Par 64. Some of these were in place when I took over their lights, but most I installed. The thing is their old light guy used Mic cable everywhere. It wasn't causing any issues at the time, so we left those cables in place, and continued to buy more Mic cable to add additional lights. Of course on the last fixture we have a terminator plug. For the last month some of the fixtures were acting eratic. Example the Shutters on the Mighty Scans would randomly open and shut for no apparent reason. Well finally we had an issue where none of the lights were working. I found that one of the cables had gone bad ( I was able to confirm this by testing it with my Swission XMT-120 ). It showed that one of the pins was grounding out to the shielding. I replaced this cable with an extra I had, and everything was back to normal. Actually it was better than back to normal. Our shutter problems with the Mighty Scans were gone.
To help clean up our wiring I am considering switching some of the cables in the daisy chain to DMX. This is mostly because we have two groups of lights ( 5 trackspots and 4 mighty scans in each group ) in which the fixtures are mounted very close to one another. The perfect length for a 3 foot DMX cable.
Now my questions is will it cause any issues by mixing DMX cables with Mic cables? or will everything be just fine?
Original Post