CMU School of Drama


Thursday, November 02, 2017

Patchbays 101 — Layout, Signal Flow, Normalizing & More

theproaudiofiles.com: Patchbays can be intimidating. It almost feels like you’re Jack Bauer disarming a bomb. There are dozens of different cables. Everything is color coded in some cryptic language. And one wrong move can bring things to a screeching halt. It’s a lot of pressure.

Patchbays are actually pretty simple. They’re used to connect one piece of equipment to another. As long as you understand how they work, there’s nothing to panic about.

1 comment:

Nicolaus Carlson said...

I am not much of a sound designer but I am interested in sound and mostly because I like quality audio. This may have been influenced in me by one of my friends whom is DJ and has a lot of equipment because of it. However, learning about sound is something I find to be important and especially so if you want to set up smaller things like home sound systems. There is a lot of equipment in sound and being able to identify and understand the purpose is very helpful. This article does a good job of explaining and even teaching about patch bays which aren’t as important for a home surround system but very important in a studio. Both of which it is very important to at the very least understand the concepts because those concepts will be used in both situations. Patch bays always do look terrifying but as explained they aren’t that hard in the end, it is just figuring out what you need and why you need that, which is harder to understand.