Radial Catapult Rack RX: The Dumbest Snake You'll Ever Love

The Radial Catapult Rack RX does exactly one thing — pulls 12 channels of analog audio off three Cat 5/6 runs and hands them back as XLR — and at a locked street price of $299.99 at B&H (flat across all five captures in our price history), it asks you to decide whether simplicity is worth the ticket.

It is. For the right rig.

What You're Actually Getting

1U. Zero watts. Twelve XLR male outputs, split across three independent four-channel banks (A, B, C), each fed by a shielded Cat cable from a compatible Catapult TX or breakout at the source. The signal is analog end to end — no conversion, no clocking, no network handshake. The path from stage to rack introduces no conversion or clocking delay whatsoever.

The per-bank ground lift is the quiet hero here. Bad ground on one run? Lift that bank without touching the others. Clean.

Spec corner: The catalog record specifies three shielded Cat 5/6 runs, each carrying four balanced analog channels — twelve channels total. The banks are independent, which means a four- or eight-channel deployment is genuinely practical; you don't have to populate the whole unit. Power draw is 0 W. The failure surface is mostly the cable and the connectors — that's a short list.

The catch: the audited record specs this as a passive receiver and lists no transformer isolation. If you need galvanic isolation, confirm it upstream and budget for it separately. The catalog specifies shielded Cat 5/6; the implication being that unshielded cable is a noise risk you're absorbing, not the unit.

The Price Argument

$299.99 buys you a passive, zero-power 12-channel snake receiver. It does not buy you digital networking, redundancy, or remote gain. If your show lives and dies on bulletproof analog routing and you're already carrying Cat infrastructure, this makes complete sense. If you're building a more complex IEM rack with monitor mixing, the Allen & Heath ME-500 is a different category of tool entirely — don't conflate them.

Owner ratings: none captured in our system yet, so the verdict here is synthesised from audited specs and catalog data alone.

No ratings yet — be the first engineer to log it.

Buy it if your rig already runs Cat infrastructure, you want an analog snake receiver with no conversion or clocking delay, and you'd rather spend complexity budget elsewhere.

Skip it if you need confirmed transformer isolation or rack-side signal processing — the audited record doesn't support either, and this unit makes no attempt at them. For transformer isolation, that's a problem to solve upstream with a dedicated DI or isolator; for monitor mixing and IEM distribution in one box, the Allen & Heath ME-500 is the category you're actually shopping.

Zero watts, no conversion delay, zero excuses — if your rig already runs Cat cable, $299.99 has rarely looked this efficient.

Featured gear in this article

• Radial Catapult Rack RX — audited specs, tracked street price, and rack fit in the planner.