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I wanted to know what the smallest diameter DMX cable is. I have an application that requires a DMX in and out to travel through a small hole along with other wires (DC Power wires).

I know the debate about using mic XLR cables in place of 3 pin DMX has been beaten to death, but I can easily find lots of thin small diameter mic cable, but have yet to come up with DMX cable that small. I want to use a regular cable with connectors on both ends. I will be needing a lot of these and don't want to buy bulk wire and spend my time soldering connectors to it.

So if thin DMX cables exist, I would love to see them. If not, is it a problem to use regular mic XLR cables for short runs of under 5 feet? For that matter, if it is that small a run, can I just use plain old hookup wire with no shielding? I suppose I could spend some time experimenting, but I would rather refer to those with experience in these matters.

I'm not trying to do this to save a buck and buy cheaper cables. All of my long runs will be certified DMX cable. I just have a size problem at one particular point that I need to solve.

All help from the DMX experts is welcome.

If anyone is interested, this is my project: http://HalloweenSkulls.com
You can see it work in the Demo Video. All the wires need to be hidden. in the video the hole that runs up through the neck is just big enough for one cable. Adding a second to daisy-chain another is impossible with the standard size cable.

The main problems with mic cable are (a) shielding, and (b) different impedance.
Since you can get balanced mic cable with foil shielding, For extremely short distances the impedance and noise rejection of the higher twists per inch is negligible at best and will likely not be a problem if the last fixture in the chain is terminated properly, and rest of cables are proper ones, so you should be perfectly fine.

For the sake of completeness your best other options might be;

It is also possible to use STP cat5 or cat6 cable (using one twisted pair to carry the + and - signal, and another pair carrying the ground). This would keep everything effectively in the rs-485 spec and allow almost any length to be used.

You could also consider a wireless transmitter to multiple receivers to clean up wiring. I use a cheap system which has done me for years and allows a lot of flexibility without worrying about cable routing, fitting through gaps, cables across doorways, etc.

Yes, small DMX cable does exist. It's not the best stuff, but I've used it over and over on big events, installation situations and more. You'd probably be good with something like this



I've made my own cables from it, but had it in blue so I knew difference for XLR cables and DMX cables.