Removing the front panel.
Many affordable patchbays come half‑normalled by default, and to change that you must flip the cards inside. It’s easy enough, but there’s a knack...
Patchbays are the unsung heroes of the recording studio, and even in a modern home‑studio setup they can be worth their weight in... well, maybe not gold but you get the idea! If properly set up, they not only allow you to connect anything in your studio (synths, processors, effects and more besides) to anything else by simply plugging cables into the front, but also to establish a ‘normal’ routing that works even with no patch cables plugged in.
If you want a more detailed look at planning and configuring your patchbay, check out Hugh Robjohns’ excellent article, Patchbays In The Modern Studio (SOS December 2020). He runs through the differences between normalled, half‑normalled and isolated (un‑normalled) setups and their pros and cons, as well as describing some useful utilities such as phase inverters and mults, which you might want to include alongside your gear. In this article, though, I want to share some simple, practical tips for setting up affordable TRS jack patchbays.
Overview
I’ve long used patchbays, but it’s only recently, when setting up a new system, that I’ve used Neutrik’s affordable NYS‑SPP‑L1 patchbays; shop around and these can be picked up new for around £55 under $100 each, and you might even find similarly designed models under different brand names slightly cheaper. While I can’t vouch for those, I can tell you that as long as these Neutrik ones are used with reasonable care, they’re perfectly decent and robust enough for a typical home/project studio.
Some slightly pricier patchbays, still at the budget end of the market, feature convenient switches to select for each channel (a vertical pair of jack sockets on the front, and a corresponding pair on the rear) whether the connection is normalled, half‑normalled, parallel or isolated. Samson’s S‑Patch+ and Behringer’s PX3000 spring to mind. I prefer the former, where the toggle switches are on the front, over the latter’s top‑mounted slide switches, which are inaccessible once installed in a rack and can sometimes slip out of position if you need to slide the device in/out of a single rack space. But really, if you plan your patchbay properly, the normalling is not the sort of thing you’ll need to change on a daily basis.
Inside the patchbay, each ‘channel’ comes in the form of a card fitted with four TRS jack sockets. These can be popped and pulled out, allowing you to flip the cards around to change the routing — the position of the pale grey jack casing (the other three have a black casing), which can poke through the front or rear panel, indicates the routing arrangement.
The Neutrik patchbays I installed recently (and others that adhere to the same basic design) may be slightly less versatile, but they do still allow you to change the configuration for each channel. To change from the default half‑normalled setup to a split or isolated one, all you have to do in theory is pop the front plate off the patchbay, pull out the channel module (a PCB with the four jack sockets attached), and flip it around. One jack socket has a grey collar, and when this faces forward it’s half‑normalled. When it’s at the back of the patchbay, it’s a split configuration, whereby the front two and bottom rear jacks are connected. In that scenario, when a jack is inserted into the grey socket at the rear (which obviously happens when you hook your gear up to it!) the top and bottom front‑rear pairs become completely isolated from each other.
It’s a neat system in theory, since it means you can mix and match the half‑normalled setup for your most commonly used signal paths and an isolated one for things you wish to patch in more occasionally. By connecting patch cords around the back, you can even create a passive splitter (ie. a parallel/mult path), whereby you plug a patch cord into the top front jack of a half‑normalled channel, and link the two rear jacks to the corresponding ones on an adjacent split/isolated pair. There’s also a separate replacement card available that caters for insert points, which allows you to connect a mixer’s (or perhaps a preamp’s) unbalanced insert sends/returns to the patchbay using regular TRS to TRS looms, rather than requiring Y‑cables.
Practicalities
I said it’s neat ‘in theory’ because I’ve seen reports online of this style of patchbay being rather flimsy. These cards are all held in place by the patchbay’s front panel, which has holes drilled to allow the jack sockets to poke through just enough to be identified (grey or black, remember?). The Neutrik model has a pretty solid panel, which exhibits only a little flex once it’s been removed (I can’t vouch for the solidity of other brands) and practically none when it’s screwed on to the chassis.
When reassembling, it’s important to seat the front panel correctly so that it fits over the cards snugly, and keeps the whole affair feeling robust and rigid. The ‘trick’ is to seat the panel over the cards, and then use something like a screwdriver to move the jacks into place.
Still, it’s possible to mess things up. First the cards are a snug fit, and to pop them out takes some force — that is, until you discover that you can simply press in the jack sockets at the rear to unseat them! Second, and more importantly, when reseating the cards you have to make sure that the jack sockets poke neatly through the holes. I’m pretty sure that some people aren’t getting the cards to sit quite right, so although the front panel manages to retain the reoriented cards, it exerts less than the intended pressure on them. Thus the unit as a whole starts to flex more and feel rather cheap when you start inserting your patch cords.
You need some sort of ‘poking device’. And the perfect tool for the job is the flat‑head screwdriver that you’ll have to hand already.
To avoid this, all you need is some sort of ‘poking device’ that you can insert into the top jack sockets — just use this to manoeuvre the cards into place as you reseat the front panel. And the perfect tool for the job is the flat‑head screwdriver that you’ll have to hand already because you need one to undo/tighten the two screws that hold the panel in place! Do this methodically, working from one side of the bay to the other, and you’ll find that the cards soon fall into alignment with a minimum of fuss and pretty much zero need to fiddle with the positioning of the front panel itself. The only other thing to bear in mind is that, once these are properly aligned, you might find that you need to press on the top of the sockets to reseat them properly — this both ensures that the sockets protrude as they should at the rear, and that the front panel is a good, snug fit.