Fiewire Cable - How Long Can I Go? Options

[Coolhat]

Hi again!

I go myself a M-Audio FW 1814 last week and it works like a dream! But the supplied FW cable is quite short, about 1 m. I´m planning to do a lot of live gig recordings and as you know, working conditions are not always ideal, so a longer FW cable would make life a lot easier. Also, I want to keep my setup as compact and portable as possible: I´d much rather have one long firewire cable and 16 short patch cables than other way around.

So, is there a restriction how long cable I can use with this kind of device? I´m not talking about miles here, something around 3-5 meters should be fine.

Thanks in advance,

Mikael

[ourmanflinty]

I've seen cables on sale up to 20m, high quality shielded etc. MOTU reccomend 15 feet maximum, around 4.5m. I would think that the longer the cable the more load you would put on the port with a risk of damage at extremes and dropouts are likely. you can buy 'repeaters' which will refresh the signal and let you go longer reliably.

[rat47]

3-5 meters is no problem - i ued much longer ones (with video) - up to 10 meters it works but you have to buy good (expensive) cables

for longer things i used powered hubs (repeaters in a way) - no problems found (and on this cable(s) i had signal coming from 3 uncompressed cameras - not bad)

[Coolhat]

Thanks for the help, guys!

I´ll definitely go for high quality wire, any suggestions? What technical specs should I be looking for? What brands do you recommend?