VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[D Voice]

Thinking with the ever-growing amount of gear (and consequently potential configurations) spreading over two adjacent rooms, a small patchbay setup or two (one in each room?) might be in order to help keep things organized, save on wear and tear, etc.

Anyone doing this?

Pictures, diagrams, recommendations and tips would be most welcome.

[heyguido]

These days, complicated is not necessary.

The simpler your audio chain, the cleaner it's likely to be.

The problem with patchbays is that every cable, every connector, can introduce additional noise into your chain.

Quality mic, quality interface (with quality pre's built in), DAW....

KISS....
_________________
Don Brookshire
"Wait.... They wanna PAY me for this?"

[D Voice]

Thanks, Dan. I do understand what you are saying and agree with it to a large extent. Especially about the beauty of simplicity and concerns about adding noise. But that is not really what I am asking about.

Sometimes, depending on the job or conditions, a different mic and preamp combination are called for, just as an example. Or sometimes I might have a need to record or monitor or listen to the audio in one room or the other. (The same goes for computer equipment, but that is perhaps beyond the scope of this forum).

Without going into too much detail, I've got two adjacent rooms, need to use each of them as they are multi-purpose rooms, not just dedicated to VO (small apartment, big city).

Wondering about those who might have used patchbays, and what they might have to share about the experience.

[ballenberg]

I have one sitting in a box waiting for me to set it up. For three years. It's somewhat (read: completely) daunting to me: Full Normal, half-normal etc, etc.
I'm just afraid that if I don't get it right, I won't be able to get things back to where they were before I started. I have no music or radio engineering background, so this is alien stuff to me.

But to answer your question, yes, I think it would definitely help--Better to be plugging and unplugging the patch cables than the main gear cables.

[vkuehn]

"patch-bay" in present day conversation can cover a multitude of sins!

For someone my age, for someone who spent some hours in radio stations of the 1950s and 1960s, I think of those rack mounted, telephone company style things with quarter-inch jacks.

For the younger set, a patch-bay may be a place where a combination of 1/8th inch plugs and jacks, some "RCA phono-jacks" and cables from all around the studio have their "other end" dangling in the "Town Square of Cables" for easy plug and unplug without crawling behind the desk and under the table.

The more plugs and jacks of any kind in your studio, the more opportunity there is for dirty contacts and intermittent signal. If you anticipate plugging and unplugging something just about every day, then it is worth the effort, and maybe you will keep the contacts "clean from exercising them".

If you are buying good quality cables, I'm not sure there are enough hours in the day to wear them out in a home studio by plugging and unplugging them. In radio stations with full-time engineers, it was always hard to keep the contacts clean on traditional patch bays.