Having to change the cabling in a studio will inevitably put you in a bad mood. Crawling around in the accumulated dust of years, rummaging around in the dark behind the rack only supported by the meager help of your flashlight and, in the end, still yanking the wrong cable! To avoid all this nuisance we, thankfully, can now utilize so-called patchbays, proven tools for professional studios as well as home studios.
To put it simply, a patchbay is a device with lots of inputs and outputs. You connect all your hardware inputs and outputs to the back side of the patchbay and the signals are then routed through to the front side. There are several sockets on the front panel that you can use to interconnect the channels. This is done using short patch cables that save you the hassle of climbing about. It allows you to connect the outputs of, e.g. your instruments to your mixer respectively your audio interface via patch cables and allocate them exactly to the desired channel.
A tip: Use, for example, the top row of a patchbay for the outputs of your instruments/microphones and the bottom row for the inputs of your mixing console. Thus it is always evident which category the socket belongs to.
Second tip: You can join the shielding of your cables here in one common point and also have a central position for the entire cabling. The result: enhanced transparency and clarity.
So-called Tiny Telephone (TT) cables are the popular choice for patchbay operations. They feature a small, space-saving (a kind of shrunk) jack plug, which, in the past, was used for connecting calls in telephone exchanges. Cordial offers this classic, which is used with many patch panels, in lengths starting with 30 cm and in the colors black, blue and red. This, again, enhances the clarity and transparency of your patchbay setup.
