AKG ICAAS10 Cascading Cable for DMM Series Automatic Microphone Mixers

AKG ICAAS10: The Link That Makes Several Automatic Mixers Behave as One

The AKG ICAAS10 is a cascading cable for DMM Series digital automatic microphone mixers, and its single job is to carry the expansion bus from one mixer to the next. DMM mixers each provide two RJ-45 sockets on the rear panel for expansion and cascading, labelled IN - EXPANSION - OUT, and this cable is the interconnect that joins one unit's output socket to the next unit's input socket. Up to ten mixers can be linked in a single chain, which takes an eight-input model from eight channels to as many as 80 channels of automatic mixing under one shared set of decisions. For an AV integrator whose room has outgrown a single automixer, this cable is the difference between one large system and several small ones that fight each other.

What the Expansion Bus Actually Carries

Expansion ports on a DMM mixer provide input and output access to the main and mix audio busses, which is why cascading works as a system link rather than a simple audio patch. An automatic microphone mixer continuously measures every input and decides which channels are carrying speech, then attenuates the rest so that room noise and comb filtering do not accumulate across dozens of open microphones; that decision is only correct if the mixer can see every microphone in the room. Sharing the busses across a cascade means channel nine on the second mixer competes for attention on equal terms with channel one on the first, instead of two mixers each independently declaring their own loudest talker open. Council chamber and courtroom techs recognise the failure that avoids, because two independent automixers in one room produce exactly twice the open-channel noise they were bought to prevent.

Ten Mixers, One Gain-Sharing Decision

Chain length is capped at ten units, and AKG publishes cascaded capacities of up to 80 channels for eight-input mixers in the DMM range. Gain sharing is the term for that single pooled decision, and it is what keeps the number of active open microphones effectively constant no matter how many are physically installed, so a room with 60 gooseneck positions still sounds like a room with two or three live microphones. Planning around this means a designer specifies mixer quantity against the seat count and then treats the whole stack as one processing block for level, equalisation and system gain. Conference centres and large council chambers are built this way precisely because the alternative, a dozen unlinked mixers, is unmanageable at commissioning time.

Installing and Commissioning the Cascade

Physical installation is deliberately simple: adjacent mixers are joined output socket to input socket, following the IN - EXPANSION - OUT labelling, and the chain is built one link at a time until every mixer is included. AKG documentation recommends using AKG accessory cables for cascading, which matters because the expansion port carries bus audio and system data rather than a single line-level signal, and a substitute of unknown construction is a difficult fault to trace once a room is full of people. Keeping one spare interconnect in the rack is standard practice for lecture-hall managers and house-of-worship techs, since a cascade link is a single point of failure for the channels living downstream of it. Labelling each link during the first commissioning pass saves an enormous amount of time the first time a mixer has to come out of the rack.