In comparison to my first home studio the electrical environment of the B-Street-Studio is much more solid.  New cabling with separate fusing from the sub-distributor, and a strictly separation between light and studio-circuits are really good prerequisites ... but if your main equipment is analog- or early digital-hardware, you had to deal with physical old electronic components inside your devices. Even if you could maintain all your devices as good as possible it is a matter of fact, that they all had overcome their estimated lifetime and produce more or less crackling, hissing, noise and other oddities. So let me say it more clearly ... That's a task in itself, to keep the old hardware in a healthy condition and to get good and stable audio from them. And even if they are working perfect, the studio-integration needs care and mostly additional effort. A "swiss knife-solution" is not only to connect Audio-Lines symmetrical ... I mostly add true audio-transformer separation to deal better with the ground-earth concepts of the vintage hardware.  

The Patchbays are the center of the studio wiring. All sources (Synthesizers, Samplers, the Rhodes Pianos, the Tape and DAT Outs) and all destinations (the Mixer Inputs, the EQ In's, the Sampling Inputs) are available here and could be patched if necessary in a different, than "Normal" way.

Each Behringer Patchbay model PX3000 is realized as a 1HE 19'' unit. It features 48 balanced connection points organized in two rows on the front and on the back too. Each 4 of the connection points (2 on the front and 2 on the back) are combined to a channel that is numbered from 1 to 24. The Source Outputs (outputs from synthesizers, samplers ...) are usually connected on the bottom row of the connection points on the back (these are the input signals of the patchbay). The Destination Inputs (f.e. the Mixer Inputs) are connected on the top row on the back (these are the output signals of the patchbay).

There are three modes to connect inputs with outputs on a patchbay which are called Normal, Half-Normal and Thru. A big advantage of the Behringer PX3000 Patchbay is, that all of the 3 modes are switchable on the top of the patchbay for each of the 24 available channels ... very conveniant. On my patchbays mostly the Normal mode is active. The "Normal" connection routes the signal to it's most likely destination without the need of patching a cable for this. In this case it routes the incoming signal from the bottom connector to the top connector of the channel. The benefit is now, that I could easily access the source-outputs or the mixer inputs, only through patching a cable in the patchbay.

In some cases I choose the Thru Mode, which realizes a direct connection between the single connector on the back to the connector on the front without any routing to the other row.  I don't use the Half-Normal Mode which is normally a good solution to handle insert signals in mixers-channels.

My Use-Cases for the Patchbay

- Patch the output of a source to a sample input of a sampler

- Patch a existing source to a alternative mixer input ... maybe I prefer the hardware equalizer from the studio

  master in a special recording situation

- Patch a new source to a mixer input

- Get patchable access to the graphic equalizer f.e. for sample pre-equalization

- Get patchable access to the recording-outputs of the DAT and Tape Recorder. Sometimes it is really fun to sample

  a tape recorded signal instead of the direct signal, or it is necessary to vary the playback speed of the recorded

  signal to get a better match to the sampling frequency of a vintage sampler.