Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I know the Wired Remote (LG4X) is available, but I am wondering if there is a less expensive way to disable the slaves and wire all my Alien Bee units together. I currently have 4 (2 B400s and 2 B800s) and I plan on ordering 2 more this week. I noticed that the LG4X can control 4 lights. Since I will have 6, I guess I would need 2 of them.

The reason why I don't want to spend the money is because 99% of the time, I am in my home studio and no one can ever set my strobes off. Next month however, some area photographers are getting together to have a group learning session and we are going to have about 5 sets of lights in the same conference room. I don't want mine going off every time someone else pops their lights. I can't justify all of the remote receivers that I would need or even the $100 for each LG4X. I have seen PC cord splitters. Is there an adapter or a splitter that could turn 1 wire into 6 and not short out the system or burn something out? For that one day, I could live with the wires.

Or, can I get phone cord and wire my own box. I don't need to be able to control the light intensity remotely like the LG4X, just pop the flash and disable the slave. Anybody have a schematic for such a device?

TonyT

Check with customer service. I believe we have splitters. If you want to build something, just parallel four 1/8" plugs and feed them to one pc plug for the camera. That should fire all four of them.

We have a 3 way PC splitter, but for 4 lights I have a diagram i can send you for Radio Shack parts. Let me know if you would like it and i can send it to the email used to register for the forum. Essentially, it is three two way splitters, a standard sync cord, and three mono to mono cables (be sure they are not attenuating cables). Let me know if you would like it.

TS

Yes. Please send me a diagram. I will order my lights and 2 splitters tomorrow and whatever cables I need that you guys sell.

I was afraid of combining voltages. But maybe I could make my wireless receiver actually fire all the lights and use the transmitter on my camera like i do now.

Thank you so much!
TonyT.

You should have an email soon

TS

I had difficulty finding the parts so I ordered the LG4X. The price would have been close to $50 anyway.

Thanks for your help!

SO, is there a way to wire the strobes via the "remote" port? and still disable the slave?

No, you cannot chain them together via the RJ-11 jack

TS

Are you sure about that?

Page 6 of this document talks about using a telephone splitter to control multiple:
http://www.paulcbuff.com/manuals/LG4XManual.pdf

Or did you mean running an RJ-11 from one strobe to another strobe? If so, then yes I agree that you can't do that :)

If you do this, you must connect an LG4X to the telephone cords. This splits one LG4X channel to control multiple lights in parallel - same power. No LG4X = no work.