Okay, I'm just gonna talk briefly about the cables that we're going to be putting on the stage today. There are three cable trunks here they all contain cables for different specific purposes. This first box is just for the mains. This distributes the electricity around the stage. This cable plugs into the distro that's underneath the stage. And we place the connector on stage and somewhere where we can access a box like this, which allows the band to plug in their various instruments into this 13 board here.

This next trunk this contains all the loudspeaker cables. This connects the monitor amplifiers to the speakers that are on this Again, we have varying lengths of this these cables from very short very long. This third box, this contains all the input stuff, the microphone cables, the boxes into which we plugged them. These are remote boxes or sub boxes, which are connected via a multi core cable to a fan in just like this which allows us to plug individual microphones into our main stage box. Those are all the cables that we're going to be using on stage today. Let's take a look at them in much greater detail.

Okay, mains cables. These connectors are called C form connectors. They are a European standard and they come in many different shapes and sizes. All of the ones that concern us certainly as far as stages are concerned our blue blue indicates they are single phase connectors that is they have a live a neutral and an earth single phase connectors come in four sizes 16 amp 32 amp 64 amp and hundred and 25 amp. This is 32 amp. This connects between the distribution board which is on the floor underneath the stage to any number of these boxes on stage which are designed to give 13 amp outlets, each one of which is individually switched for the band's equipment.

There are some other kinds of C form cable, the same shape of connector and the same size of connector. They are however different colors. red ones indicate three phase cables now these three lives a neutral and an earth and the yellow ones indicate American 110 volt 60 hertz power supplies rather than the British or European standard that is 220 volts at 50 hertz Okay, moving on to loudspeaker cables. This particular system only uses one kind of loudspeaker cable. Although there are many different kinds both have cable and connectors. These are all four core cables, and they have a steel EP connector.

This is an EP five, you can see quite clearly here that there are five pins in the connector. And these cables are wired in such a way as it is impossible. Using the DMV amplifiers and loudspeakers that we have, it is impossible to plug the wrong cable into a loudspeaker. The loudspeaker will simply not work it's not possible to cause any damage. These cables connect directly to the back of the amplifier or between the amplifier and the loudspeaker. Although when we are actually putting the PA system together, we use multi core cables that are called socket packs, cables which Are the equivalent of four of these cables in one large multi core cable.

There are many other kinds of loudspeaker connectors. Commonly you will find. Many pa companies choose to use plastic connectors, as they're called speak on connectors. And they come in two sizes, speak on fours or speak on eight. They are fairly inferior to these connectors but they are an awful lot cheaper and most companies use them. We however don't.

Moving on. This is the signal input system. These are the cables that we're going to use on the stage and we'll be explaining their uses a little further as we put the stage together. Very often on a stage such as the village underground stage, you would see here, it is necessary to run mic cables from the main stage box, which is usually off stage somewhere. In this case, it's underneath the monitor position off stage left. Obviously, we will need to run cables to inputs that are all over the stage.

In order to avoid having to run large numbers of long cables, we use what are referred to as satellite boxes boxes like this. Some people call them sub boxes or sub snakes is a particularly American term. But basically what this is, is a remote means of plugging a number of inputs into one particular position. This is a 12 pair box. As you can see, there are 12 female XLR inputs right here. These last four mile XLR up in parallel With the last four females here, and the reason for this we'll talk about a little bit later on, it's for sending signal.

The other way up, the signal flow across the stage basically consists of plugging inputs into this box, which then are by the use of a multi core signal cable carried across the stage. On the other end of the multi core signal cable is a fan out, it's a fan out because it outputs from the box into the main stage box. Therefore male XLR to female XLR, it's known as a fan in and is a four signals flowing in the other direction. This is a very standard and common way of picking up input any point at the stage or any part of the stage that we can. And, of course it allows us to freely patch any instrument or microphone anywhere on the stage into any input we like, therefore facilitating a nice easy layout for the sound engineers who are actually operating the board. We very often will use color codes to differentiate between the boxes.

This particular box is going to be my stage right box and his code color coded in orange tape as you can see here there's a little bit of orange tape on the connector that is at the stage box and there are orange pieces of orange tape on each one of the XLR tiles. Orange tape on the cable and I shall be labeling the box using surprise surprise. Orange PVC type and this box is actually going to be called box B box a will be the box for the drums. Be will be the stage right box. boxy will be the set downstage center box. Cool this guy.

There you go. That's all ready for deployment on the stage and labeling as far as the appropriate inputs are concerned when we've decided what those are going to be