I am building a custom snake for our studio / rehearsal space. The goal is to have a mic panel in the live room that has all of the inputs to go into our Digi 003 and Presonus DigiMax FS. The panel in the live room was going to have 16 neutrik combo connectors, so we can either plug in xlr or 1/4" cables. The panel will be connected to the snake going into the studio.

My questions are concermining the snake.

1. Is putting neutrik combo connectors on the panel a good idea? Or should I have separate mic and line inputs?

2. How should I terminate the other end of the snake? Example: On the Digi 003r inputs 1 - 4 can either be mic or line, if I wanted the first input on the panel to go straight to input 1 on the 003 should I have 1/4" male or xlr male on the other end? Can I have both? One input (the neutrik in the live room) going to both 1/4" male and xlr male. The reason being if I wanted to just record gtr going DI I would plug the inst cable from the gtr into the panel 1 and then plug the 1/4" male into input 1 on the 003.

3. The Digimax FS has eight neutrik combo connectors on the front of the unit. If I wanted inputs 8 - 16 on the panel to correspond to inputs 1 - 8 on the Digimax, what would be the best way to terminate that end? 1/4" or xlr male? Example: Could I plug a microphone into the panel going into input 1 on the Digimax, and have it be 1/4" on the other end.

That is my situation, if anyone has any good information on building snakes or knows a better way to achieve what I am tring to I would live to hear it. I will be ordering the panel and snake from whirlwind if that helps any.

Thanks!

The only thing I can think of would be the line level difference between a balanced and a unbalanced input. With discrete inputs you know what should be happening, with the combo inputs it may become "iffy"
As far as long runs you want them to be balanced(low impedance, XLT,RTS) to keep the line noise down. If the combos are XLR/RTS it should be OK. But you would not want to plug a guitar cord into it directly.
You do not want any long runs with unbalanced lines.(guitar cord)

Personally I would make them all XLR/RTS at the panel and XLR at the other end (balanced) and use adapters at either end where ever you need to. This would make all lines of the snake more versatile.

How long is the snake going to be?

What sources are you recording?

How many of your input sources are going to be 1/4" sources?

Ideally, probably the snake inputs would all be XLR, and you'd use (decent) DI boxes for everything that wasn't a balanced XLR source to begin with.

If most of your sources are drum mics, guitar-amp mics, vocal mics, and maybe a couple DI inputs for bass or keys, going with an 'all inputs XLR' snake and using DI boxes for the couple non-XLR sources would probably make the most sense and give the best results.