![]() ![]() This is because the gear in the commercial studios can change so often they would be forever re-printing the patchbay labels to keep up with the changes in equipment. Steve told me how at Capitol Studios in LA the patchbays (of which there are a great many) are not labelled with the name of the piece of gear but labelled with the patch line number. ![]() Thanks to my friend Steve Genewick for this one. This will make more sense when we look at the rear of the 8024 patchbay and you see how the connections are made. So on a pair of rows, it's out on the top and in on the bottom row. One of the conventions is where ever possible the upper row is the send and the lower row is the return. There are three rows of user configurable patchbay on the 8024. In talking to many of my friends and contacts in the industry I have gleamed some of the more commonly used conventions when it comes to arranging and setting up ones patchbay. There is a lot more to it that that, but this is not a complete guide to configuring every brand and type of patchbay, this article is about how I have chosen to use the patchbays that are built into my Audient ASP8024 console and these are not configurable as either normalised or half normalised. Meaning one configuration is set when there are no patch cables connected, which you can change when you start plugging cables in and so override the preset configuration. Once again without diving in too deep, normalising and half normalising are techniques used to allow connections (or routing) to be made in your patchbay whilst there are no patch cables inserted. Normalised and half normalised are terms that you might hear when engineers get very geeky and talking about how they have configured their patchbays. Changing this configuration by messing around the back of our rack in at best a pain in the ^%$£! so we use a patch panel or patchbay, or old people like Mike call them jackfields, to make changing our routing nice and simple and nice and tidy. One minute we could be tracking using a compressor as an insert on an input channel and in the next we could be using the same compressor on our master bus. ![]() So why would we add more connections and solder joints when we can "hard patch" it all together? Well, it turns out that we like to use our gear in a number of different ways. ![]() What Does A Patchbay Do?Īt it's most basic, a patchbay brings the connections from the rear panel of your gear (be that outboard racks or your mixing console) onto a panel where using what we now call patch cables or cords we can link all our units together without the need to fumble around the back of the racks to connect the gear, keeping it all nice and tidy. After talking with the guys at Audient and after trying the desk in a real world recording environment I decided to pony up the extra cash and opt for the patchbay section and I have to admit it is one of the best gear decisions I have ever made. When I was planning the purchase of my Audient 8024HE console, one of the big questions was whether to get the optional attached patchbay or not. Everyone has their go-to pieces of gear for a particular instrument and tricks for getting greatest snare drum sound you have ever heard, but as far as I can tell there are no rules what so ever as to how to arrange and wire-up a patchbay. There a very few hard and fast rules in the audio world, besides maybe "More CowBell" and never use channel one of the mixer in a rehearsal studio. ![]()
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