While we will be the first to admit that a new patchbay is not the sexiest of studio upgrades, it very well may be one of the most important! In short, a patchbay is your central control for interfacing every input and output between each and every analog component in your studio. In one place, you can now have access to infinite combinations of preamps, compressors and EQs, all as simple as moving a few sets of cables.
New user friendly patch bays
Many studio owners still have the “birds nest” of wires behind their gear, and this leaves their compressors and EQs always hard-patched behind certain preamps. The newer version of the Audio Accessories TT DB25 patchbay has revolutionized the modern studio with its ease of use and on-the-fly setup. These patchbays are a great way to erase that situation and give your studio the flexibility it needs to quickly patch in any outboard equipment. The time and energy this saves during tracking or mix down is invaluable, and allows you as the engineer to not focus on gear management, but on making the gear perform for you.
We added a fifth solderless plug n’ play patchbay to the Sound Pure Studios A Room, and the experience was so easy and painless that we felt we should share this with everyone. A little back ground on patchbays: once upon a time installing patchbays was an evil project that you never wanted to 
tackle yourself. Why you ask? Who wants to spend all day over a soldering iron, breathing in lead while being frustrated with trying to melt tiny wires together?
Small and sexy, these “TT” cables are balanced and how you connect all of your inputs and outputs within the patch bay
Not me, and probably not you either.
To further infuriate patchbay owners, in the old days you were forced to map out your studio in advance, as most solder patchbays lacked the ability to change the normal settings once they were shipped to you. What if you changed out a few units in your studio and replaced compressors with preamps? These new plug-and-play patchbays give you the ability to change from any normal setting (FN fully normal, HN half normal, and NN non normal) as well as any ground setting (isolated, bussed, or grounds vertically strapped [GVS]). This on-the-go adaptability is what really sets this product apart, and if you are unfamiliar with grounding and normalizing, give us a call.
Thankfully patchbays have come a long way in the last few years. For our studio, this has been a godsend, as we are constantly changing gear around as well as demoing new pieces in the studio. The Audio Accessories TT to DB25 quick switch patch bays integrate into small and large studios alike flawlessly because they are not only simple to use, but they are 100% configurable on the fly.
This is an example of a typical DB25 to fan cable (in XLR). We can get DB25 cables in everything from DB25 to TRS to XLR in Mogami cabling
Let’s say you just upgraded from preamps with TRS style outputs to preamps with XLR or DB25 block outputs? Now all you have to do is switch out the DB25 style cable to the appropriate type.
No soldering, no mess, no fuss, and virtually zero maintenance. When it comes to down to the cable manufacturer, Mogami cabling is not only an industry standard, but what we ran our entire studio with.
This “plug and play” setup is revolutionizing how simple it is to add and maintain a patchbay system. As easy as these have become to install and set up yourself, there really isn’t any reason for any studio owners with outboard gear not to have one.