Cranborne Audio N22/ N22H Review
I do not have the luxury of having a real tracking room in my home studio. While most of the programming and playing I do doesn’t require a separate quiet room away from my computer’s fan, I have had to record a fair amount of vocals lately. This has put me in the position of having to run a bunch of cables to a spare room to set up mics and a headphone cue for the musicians. My wife is for SOME reason under the mistaken impression that my tracking room is actually the guest bedroom…the nerve!
I had been researching solutions but kept finding a major flaw in everything that I looked at until I came across Cranborne Audio’s N22/N22H combo. These two small boxes use the multipair wires in a single shielded CAT cable to allow you to run stereo audio to and from your designated tracking area. This means one cable to run rather than four and it makes set up MUCH simpler. Additionally, only the tracking side of the combination needs a power supply.
The N22 is the simpler end of the system.
Having the inputs on Neutrik combo jacks makes the system very flexible, allowing it to take in balanced or unbalanced audio on either quarter inch or XLR and featuring separate outputs in both formats. This side does NOT require a power supply and I have it wired up to the ins and outs of an Apollo Twin in my control room.
A single shielded CAT5 (like these from Amazon, and yes this is an affiliate link I will make a nickel on if you click and buy something) is what makes the connection work. CAT cable features four twisted pairs of connections but the four balanced cables it is replacing actually would require twelve connection points for positive, negative and ground on each cable. I will cover common mode rejection in a future article to explain why.
Cranborne solves the need for 12 connectors by using the shield wrapped around the twisted pairs inside the CAT cable to function as the ground for all four cable runs. This is a fairly common solution in multi-pair snakes already.
You could have another N22 on the other end of the CAT cable but I have chosen to use their clever N22H which adds a high quality headphone output to the feature set on the box instead of the dual XLR outputs on the N22. While the N22H does require power it is configured to also run on a standard 9 volt battery if you need to use it in a remote situation.
The single CAT cable will then carry your monitor mix from your control room to the practice room and two mic signals back to your interface. Phantom power is fully supported so you can use your favorite condenser microphones or any dynamic.
What Cranborne refers to as their CAST system allows these little boxes to play nicely with all gear, but they buddy up even closer to their additional range of equipment, including their mic pres and audio interfaces. The flexibility of also being able to add up to a 100 foot shielded CAT cable and use these boxes in the field makes them even more flexible.
Because there are two of those CAST connectors (RJ45) on each box, it is tempting to try to connect them to other things. I would suggest caution on this as the system is not digital and by interconnecting in odd ways you can accidentally be connecting outs to outs or ins to ins and get strange behavior. Cranborne did send me a diagram showing the one additional connection that would work with multiple boxes that I have added below.
In use I found the system to work very well. The headphone output is high quality and will push even my power greedy Sennheiser HD650 headphones to blistering levels. Use the volume knob with caution!
At a total price of $299 with a shielded CAT cable, there are cheaper solutions out there. What I found was that they all missed the mark somewhere. The Cranborne pieces are dependable, built like tanks and sound and perform admirably. I would recommend them.
