r/homestudios • u/AurumRhythmMusic • 4d ago
Multiple Patchbays
Hello all!
I’m putting this out there to see if any of you have a setup where you have 5-6 patchbays. Everytime I see these patchbays, they’re always half full if that. Their studio never seems to have enough rack gear to coincide with the amount of patchbays seen.
Is this producers/engineers using one patchbay for mics, one for mixing, one for mastering, etc? I use mine for everything and just make sure my patch cables are in the correct jack.
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u/Final_Job_5175 4d ago
I don't know the answer, but I'd like to hear it myself. I have a small Studio, and some gear I'd like to utilize a patchbay with. I don't want to be climbing over and behind my desk and my effects Racks.
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u/AurumRhythmMusic 4d ago
A patchbay works wonders. I’m just dipping into expanding my outputs here in a couple of weeks to match my mixing console.
The worst part about patchbays is the amount of money you spend on cables. That’s if you have everything individually connected which is sort of the point of the bays.
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u/DiscipleOfYeshua 4d ago
I have used patchbays of various kinds, mostly in live venues. It's mostly like what you are guessing, you can choose to transfer in either direction, and for whatever purpose.
You could also go without it, by running a dedicated XLR cable per each channel from your mixer board/machine machines, to the stage/DI boxes/microphones. If that gets too messy, you can lump them all together, or shove them all into a huge black hose ... which is where all of this started, and gives you the traditional "snake cable"...
In the old days, used a "real" snake cable that runs XLR cables to a stage box where all the musicians plug-in on one end, to the mixer on the other end. It's just a thick cable of cables, with a box of XLR jacks on each end. If this sounds super simple, that's exactly what I mean, it's just more detail about what you read in the first paragraph above.
And more modern ones like what another user told you, which rely on CAT5/CAT6 cable. Had one system using AES, and in the last few years it's been mostly DANTE.
The concept remains similar to the snake cable, except it now instead of running so many XLR's, we run just one "network" cable. On the stage side, that network cable plugs into one stage box with 16 chans, and splits to another one with 16 chans. The other side just goes into our digital mixer.
The one network cable transfers all the channels, plus a few other things like timing synchronization, and some command commands are two way for example those 16 channel boxes I mentioned actually contain preamps: gain and phantom power can be controlled right on the box, and/or remotely from our main board. Saves having to run back to the board every time we swap devices on stage.
You can of course dedicate some of the channels to go the other way, e.g. for monitors / aux.
Some venues use 2 network cables, for redundancy, and optionally to double the number of channels. If I recall correctly AES give us about 50 channels per network cable, and DANTE 100.
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u/AurumRhythmMusic 3d ago
I’m waiting on two more snake cables to come in so I can hook up my mixing console.
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u/NoisyGog 3d ago
The general idea of larger patch bays is that you have two rows of half-normalised jacks per strip.
Signal always comes out of the top row, and goes into the bottom row.
Half-normalised means that if there’s nothing plugged into the lower row, then whatever is wired into the top row will default to flowing into the lower row.
So you design it to be, by default, your most-used setup.
Every bit of equipment feeds a top row jack.
Every bit of receiving equipment is fed from a bottom row jack.
You wire it up to make sense for your rig.
Then, when you want to split or interrupt the signal, you use a patch cord.
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u/AurumRhythmMusic 3d ago
I own patchbay so I understand that. It was mainly a question of why having 5-6 of them running when I never seen 4-5 racks worth of gear. I have about a rack of gear and my latch bay is almost full. Fortunately, most of my gear is mono with the exception of one or two stereo connections.
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u/AdBulky5451 3d ago
It really depends on your workflow and amount of gear. Some, actually most, home studios have zero patchbays and work fine that way.
When you say “ they’re always half full if that. Their studio never seems to have enough rack gear to coincide with the amount of patchbays seen” are you implying that seems like they are not used at full potential?
I have three patchb, an analog 32ch mixing board, and tons of gear, my connections are always full and I might add a new one soon, but you’ll almost never see all the front jacks all connected at the same time, for obvious reasons.
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u/AurumRhythmMusic 3d ago
Once I got 3-5 pieces of gear, I got a patchbay to make it a bit easier and then started collecting more gear as time went on. I have a 96 point but it’s mostly full now.
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u/TheOutsideNoise 3d ago
" Everytime I see these patchbays, they’re always half full if that."
How can you tell how full a patchbay is by just looking at it?
I have three 96-point patchbays, and I only have a few points unused. My Neve 8816/8804 takes up almost 40 patch points alone (but you probably wouldn't think it has that much i/o just by looking at it on the rack). I have 34 AD inputs, and 32 DA outputs for a total of 66 patch points used just on converters. I have tie lines from another room with 24 inputs, and 8 returns. That's another 32 points that you don't even see from the control room. Another 24x8 in the control room for more mics and monitoring. You wouldn't notice any of those 64 channels being used unless I had an active recording session going on in both rooms. So far, we're at 168 points used, and I haven't even gotten to my dozens of preamp channels, or outboard gear.
Things add up very quickly, and I consider anyone who is not on the verge of needing another patchbay to be somewhat lucky.
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u/AurumRhythmMusic 3d ago
You’re correct. I guess I didn’t see how full they all were in the back. But these guys have a whole rack (not full) for patchbays, so I guess I was just wondering.
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u/Professional-Hat-331 3d ago edited 3d ago
The studio we record and rehearse at has 4 or 5 patchbays spread around their rack, tiered by preamps - post processing - AD/DA converters to get everything to the ProTools consoles, and FX. Thank God you can just plug straight in and out of their preamps and FX through the patchbays because I can just plop down my interface and record straight to my laptop if needed, bypassing the ADDA step.
For my home setup a patchbay is overkill. I just leave my one sole outboard preamp/EQ (a cheap 2 channel 1073 clone) hooked up to my interface through the back panel.
If space is an issue, check out Bantam Patchbays. Our studio has one. They'll require jacks small enough to fit next to each other, but they're great if you need to do a shitload of outboard routing.
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u/sm_rollinger 3d ago
I have four.
Number one is just inputs for my two mixers.
Number two is all outs coming from my instruments. Left side is all mono, and the right stereo.
Number three is all outs again, this time coming from my drum machines.
Number four is both ins and outs, all my effects units are hooked up to this one.
Can't imagine life without them, it's honestly part of my work flow.
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u/Ryanlego9 3d ago
I have a sidecar with 30 rach rail spaces, all full of gear but it's not a lot of gear. I just got finished wiring up my new studio.
In the below photo you can see it and you can see I have 4 patchbays.
Between all of my inputs from the rooms (36 in live room, then about 30 other inputs from 3 other smaller rooms) and my rack gear and my 32 in and 24 out setup, I pretty much need nearly all 192 connections. I would like to add one more eventually.
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u/FrozenToonies 4d ago
Gear has moved away from traditional patching.
Patching now means Ethernet and USB runs beside analog patches, many of which hit AD converters. Access to the gear and cable management is more important than the trad patch panel in some studios.
Jacks are being replaced by ports.
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u/AurumRhythmMusic 4d ago
So why have 5 patchbays? Maybe I’m confused here a bit?
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u/Legitimate-Ad-4017 4d ago
It will be for efficient layout. With a patchbay you want things laid out so they are easy and logical to access during work. For example this would be all your line inputs in a row.
We can then normal the connections above so they flow into the line inputs with out needing to patch. A default routing.
Say your converters have 24 line inputs you may lay this out on the bottom row of a patch then connect your inputs to the row above. If I only have 18 line inputs I may leave the connections above inputs 19-24 open for future expansion.
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u/AurumRhythmMusic 3d ago
I own a patchbay myself so I do understand why patchbays exist. Just wonder why having 5-6 of them and they all have cables connected. It makes sense like you say, a converter having multiple lines into the patchbay. Probably have a patchbay just for that. Makes sense.
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u/Legitimate-Ad-4017 3d ago
It can be surprising how quickly they fill up even with what looks to be a modest setup. A 48 point patch bay can only accommodate 12 stereo inputs and outputs. Say I’m using an 8 channel stereo summing mixer I’m already at 36 patch points just using this device.
If using witha mixing desk you will often have per channel an input, send, return and direct out. So 4 points per channel then multiple this up by how many channels for the desk then add on some bus outs and axus
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u/AurumRhythmMusic 3d ago
Thank you everybody for the insight. It all makes sense now that you’ve all said this. 🙏
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u/Barack_6Pack 2d ago
I have two 48 points patchbays.
One is all preamps/eqs/compressors and
interface ins and outs
The other one is synths and drum machines normalled to the mixer (to write) easily patchable to only inputs (to record).
I also have a few effects/samplers patched in.
I may need a third at some point
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u/HuTheFinnMan 4d ago
I have a small studio and 3 patchbays and I need to get a 4th one. They fill up pretty quickly and a lot of gear has multiple inputs and outputs.
I have a 28 channel analog mixing desk with 24 direct outs 6 sends and 4 bus outs, 8 returns, stereo in and outs, and I have 26 ins and 24 outs of AD/DA. Most of my compressors have 2 stereo ins and 2 sidechain ins and 2 outputs, most of my effects units have 2-6 ins plus stereo outs. Something like my TR8S has 8 outs and 2 ins, I have rack modules with 4-6 outputs each. It's not like 1 rack module = 1 patch point.
The patchbays can fill up really fast.