Been a while since I updated the ol' blog here. Upping my PB during the DKOO breathed some new life in to me, as far as enthusiasm for DK goes. I've been committing the time to continuing the pursuit of ever greater accomplishments in the game, but the enthusiasm just hasn't been there most times. Well, it's back...at least for now.
I took the week off work, cuz I had a bunch of vacation days accruing. There's never a good time to take off, but it's been so ridiculously busy since the beginning of the year, I needed a breather. And, of course, what better way to spend the time, while the kids are at school, than hobbying.
I decided to finally bullet-proof all the cabling in my direct feed setup, and do some cable management. I originally patched all the cabling together with quick disconnects, as a means for troubleshooting while developing the concept. But, now that the solution is tried and true, I grew ever more leary of the sleeping beast giant that is the potential for failure at each quick disconnect (both the crimps to the cables, and the QD connection itself). In fact, I lost blue on the direct feed, a couple months back, which was remedied by simply shaking and pulling on cables. This only served to reinforce concerns I already had in the back of my mind.
So, with wire strippers, heat shrink, some spare wire, and my solder iron, I set about to remove all the QD's, strip back the wire where the QD's had previously been, then solder the splices and seal 'em up nice with some heat shrink.
After a couple hours, I re-connected all the cabling, and started wire management. The wire management was coming out nice, and I kept telling myself "don't get too far without firing up the cab and testing". But, the wire management was going so cleanly, you know how sometimes the wires just seems to manage themselves, all you have to do is grab zip ties fast enough so that the way things are rolling out doesn't fall out of your hand? Well, it was one of those jobs. Everything looked money.
And then I turned everything on to test....no green.
![FailFish FailFish](https://donkeykongforum.net/Smileys/default/failfish.png)
Jiggled wires, tugged on wires, no quick remedies to be had. So, back out the cable bundle comes, after clipping about 10 perfectly placed zip ties and watching the neatness dissolve back into a jumble of unmanaged wires.
A bit of continuity testing, and lo and behold, a connection at a butt connector was failed. I didn't bother replacing the butt connectors with solder splices, cuz those are already solid enough in my mind. Not this one, though. A bit more stripping, soldering and heat shrinking, and back into the cabinet I go.
Mind you, I only pull my cab maybe 4' off the wall to work in it, having to climb over a desktop computer and behind the cabinet every time I need to get in there. A) The A/V cables for the direct feed out to my capture setup don't reach very far once they get to the cab. B) I don't like moving my cabinet any more than I have to.
So, I re-make all the connections. And, of course, this time the cable management doesn't go as smooth and I have the sense the end result isn't as good as the first attempt looked. But, it's a marked improvement over what it had been for the last however many months since I put it all in to the point of being satisfied with the capture results and not having the desire to touch it again until recently. While I was in there, I also took the time to do a little management of the wiring that connects to the PCB, as well as spending the time fully dialing in my monitor.