Patchbays

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   Anyone else here using patch bays ?

Rather than dig around behind a desk, swearing, going through jumbles of leads, I decided it might be a good idea to put a patchbay in the rack. Neutrik one, half normalled. 

I make my own cables (mainly to cut down on excess spaghetti in the studio) and I'm soldering this weekend, so I've not got around to testing it yet. Looks like I'm going to have about 80m of audio cable in a tiny room, so cable indentification stickers are a bit of a must. 

The principle of using a half normalled patchbay is pretty simple, once you get the idea. I'm expecting that it's going to make switching between instruments and interfaces and effects a lot simpler. Well. I'd hope so. ;-)

So, any other patchbay fans here ? 

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Davesax1965 Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: May 23 2013 Location: UK Status: Offline Points: 2839	Topic: Patchbays Posted: July 06 2017 at 06:14
	Anyone else here using patch bays ? Rather than dig around behind a desk, swearing, going through jumbles of leads, I decided it might be a good idea to put a patchbay in the rack. Neutrik one, half normalled. I make my own cables (mainly to cut down on excess spaghetti in the studio) and I'm soldering this weekend, so I've not got around to testing it yet. Looks like I'm going to have about 80m of audio cable in a tiny room, so cable indentification stickers are a bit of a must. The principle of using a half normalled patchbay is pretty simple, once you get the idea. I'm expecting that it's going to make switching between instruments and interfaces and effects a lot simpler. Well. I'd hope so. ;-) So, any other patchbay fans here ?


Davesax1965 Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: May 23 2013 Location: UK Status: Offline Points: 2839	Posted: July 08 2017 at 08:50
	Here we go. Coloured leads below. Instead of reaching around the back of cabs and keyboards for endless cables, you pipe them all into the back of a patchbay. The INPUTS go in at the top, the OUTPUTS go in at the bottom. This is on the back of the case and invisible. What you then do is patch the front of the patchbay using jack leads. If I've got, say, a Korg synth on 12, I take the output and feed it to the input of, say, a delay unit on.... 14. I take the output from 14 (synth with delay) and patch it to channel 20 input, which is my audio interface. No more scratching around behind cabinets, just easily plug in or out. You can leave connections on the back permanently plugged in. Plugging something into the front panel overrides the back connection. Easy.