I smell a rat! The Rat Sniffer XLR Cable Tester.

[Axtman]

Does anyone have experience with SoundTools - XLR Sniffer/Sender Cable Tester affectionately known at "The Rat Sniffer"?

https://www.ratsoundsales.com/p/soun...-snifsend.html

I have an installed snake that I suspect has a few bad XLRs. I like the fact that this test has a send and receive unit so I can use it on stage and at the mixer.

Has anyone used this cable checker?

[The Dude]

I haven't seen that before, but it looks like a handy tool if you do a lot of that sort of work.

[olddawg]

$55.. a no brainer..

[Axtman]

I went ahead and bought it. I really need to suss out problems with the venue's snake before our gig on Monday. I will let you know how it goes. I figure $55 is cheap aspirin for the headaches we have been having....that is if it works.

[Leo_Gnardo]

I went ahead and bought it. I really need to suss out problems with the venue's snake before our gig on Monday. I will let you know how it goes. I figure $55 is cheap aspirin for the headaches we have been having....that is if it works.

I hope it works for you too.

A little story time. Some 15-20 years ago, the band I worked for often played a well known major hotel in Atlantic City. They had a house snake that ran below the floor in a crawl space, stage to mix platform as they do. Last time we were there, all kinds of noise on many channels, loud crackles. "Sounds like DC leakage" I thought. So, as an experiment we shut off phantom power entirely, then the crackles went away. Then I called for our own snake to be broken out and installed - NOT in the crawl space - then sound check & show went perfectly well. Local stage hands told me there was a rat infestation in the crawl space, and it had been a problem for a long time. Hungry bored rats with long sharp nasty teeth had been chewing on the house snake and turned it into scrap metal. So with that in mind, I think it's very appropriate your new device is named Rat Sniffer. And for those curious, the venue was NOT one of Don Trumpus's AC casino/hotels. We played those too. Different set of problems there. But great house crews everywhere, wonderful folks to work with, bless 'em all.

Hope your snake problems turn out to be something you can fix with a soldering iron and maybe a handful of new connectors. Good luck and let us know how it works out.

[g1]

Hungry bored rats with long sharp nasty teeth had been chewing on the house snake

I shared a farm house once with a guy that had a boa constrictor, big one, 9 or 10 feet long? It was sometimes free to get in and out of it's enclosure and roam the house.
When I no longer lived there, he went on holidays in the winter and turned down the heat. The snake had a heating rock in it's enclosure. Some how the snake busted out and got into the cooler part of the house. It kind of went into hibernation and got chewed up by rats and died.