Normalled patch

Having signal grounds that originate from differently grounded equipment around a facility all landing on one patchbay and tied together might create a maelstrom of ground noise.

By keeping them all separate, you keep any ground noise on one line from leaking into all the others. There are other examples, such as the case where you have a cramped patchbay layout and inputs have ended up on both the top and bottom rows time to buy an additional bay and expand!

Another example is when you have outboard gear landing on a bay that you do not want interacting with anything else in your studio. Keeping all points isolated minimizes any possible interaction between that gear and your other gear unless you physically make the connection with a patch cord.

Normalling, also referred to as fully normalled is the most common configuration for audio patchbays. A benefit of normalling is to have the bay route signals for us automatically. Example: A line output signal on the top row flows from top to bottom and into a line input on the bottom row without the need for a patch cable.

Fully normalled jacks allow the signal at either the top or bottom patch points to be broken by patching into either row. Say you have a mic line on the top row and a mic preamp input normalled right below it. For some reason, that mic preamp is acting up, and you want to patch it over to another mic pre.

A fully normalled patch point will allow you to re route mic line 1 over to mic input 2 breaking both the normal signal input to mic pre 2 and the normal connection to the first mic preamp.

If you want to only have your compressors, reverbs and headphone amps wired to a bay that would work also. This will save a ton of money because you will save in all the cableing and patchbays.

The compressors should not be normaled. Usually aux's that are pre fader would be normaled to phone amps and post fader aux's would go to reverbs but either may be patched for what ever application your performing at the time. Stephen - Fats and others have pretty well covered the facts, other than I've seen several bays that allow switched normalling such as Neutrik, Furman, etc - Here is yet another viewpoint which may simplify things for you.

I think of patch bays as merely a way of extending all those pesky rear panel connections that are nearly impossible to get to, so you can change things around temporarily to accomplish a task that is not "normal" - as Fats pointed out, there are some pieces of gear you should not normal, some that should be half-normalled, and some that should be full-normalled. I set up the drawing according to proposed signal flow from input to output s , leaving enough room for wires to be drawn between boxes.

I do this in a basic CAD program, makes it easier to do changes Once you have a drawing of all your gear, and the way it "normal"ly will be connected, you can then decide which connections you will want to change on a regular basis, which you may want to change occasionally, and which ones you'll only change if a connection goes bad. These last types are a waste of money for patch bays If on a budget, you would use this info to prioritize and to figure out how many bays you need for your system.

From the drawing, I then use different colored double lines drawn perpendicular to the connection lines, depending on whether the patch is to be half, full, or non-normalled.

For example, you could use red, blue and green for the 3 main possibilities. These marks would look like a schematic drawing of a capacitor, except that the line continues thru the two perpendiculars. Once you have decided which connections will be done which way, just count the red, blue, and green hash marks and that's the number of PAIRS of patch points you need, minimum.

The next drawing to make is a pictorial drawing of the actual bay, from the front. Draw circles for each jack, leaving room between for printing source and destination information. If you, for example, were using an OctoPre "normally" connected into the line in's of the first 8 channels of your board, you might label the first 8 upper jacks as "OctOut1", Then the second row wired to the first 8 line in's of the board would read "LinIn1", etc - Bays usually don't give you much room for labeling, so you need to find a shorthand that works for you - growing up with DOS instead of Windows helps you learn to be concise here.

I've had fair luck using laser labels with 6 point type in Word, then trimming them small enough to fit, then finally covering with trimmed lengths of 3M magic mending tape low glare, better readability Some of the bays I mentioned allow you to just flip a small circuit card over after removing the front or rear of the bay chassis in order to change the normalling.

Others require going into the connectors and re-soldering. For more permanent installs, I would recommend the solder type, which also tend to have soldered rear connections. These take longer to set up, but the less plug-in connections you have in a patch system, the less likely you will have connector corrosion problems later. I would STRONGLY recommend that you wire the solder type bays with wires routed to the same side of the rack and dressed neatly so that you can open the bay either to the side, top or bottom choose one, depending on accessibility , this way you can open the bay and get to connections after it's installed, and change or add connections easily.

I would also recommend that you use a consistent labeling method for all cables, so you can tell without having to trace a wire physically just where it goes to and from. You write thru a window in the dispenser onto the white part, peel the label off and wrap it around the cable. The clear part covers the written part to protect it. I find that the best arrangement of bays for ME is to follow signal flow. I put all the "normal" connections, as in the usual way things are connected, at the upper left.

Compressors and other gear that isn't almost always in the signal path, get their own bays usually non-normalled ones - I also try NOT to have gear that needs to be adjusted frequently placed below the bays.

Just too many cables in the way. Hopefully I managed to stir the mud even more, making an already confusing issue totally indecipherable Hi Steve, :w: I'll keep this short and simple Patch bays are good and worth as much money as you can spare. I use one 24 way cable per connector 12 to female XL3 and 12 to male XL3.

In other words 12 coming and 12 going. Slide in labelling. Totally modular and when you are growing fast nothing remains the same. I set this up for one friend and now they all want it.

I will be in patch panel hell for at least the next year. It does take time. Thanks for the help. I am still trying to figure out which 'normal' to use for each piece of gear. Maybe what would help me to finally understand and others for that matter if they are having trouble with this to is Tags normalled patchbay normalled explained.

User account menu Log in Reset Password. Losing the input attenuator for this input isn't a big deal, because you can always use any of the three remaining FM control inputs, but we'll further explain this in the Voltage Controlled Oscillators section.

But using patch cables reveals a world of flexibility, making it just as flexible as any modular synthesizer. As a result, you truly get the best of both worlds. And even if you're an experienced modular user, the numerous normalled connections make sound creation super fast and fun.

It should go without saying that we're a bunch of hardcore synthesizer nerds around these parts, so we encourage you to take advantage of the power and creativity of patch cables. Basic use of cables is super easy, but since CA utilizes the same highly developed cabling system used in its big brother, Voltage Modular, it's got a number of tricks up its sleeve that aren't immediately obvious. Patching A Cable - Simply click on a jack, drag the cable to the desired destination jack and release the mouse button.

Cables can be. Inputs and Output Jacks Unlike a hardware modular synth, where some jacks can be used as inputs or outputs, all Voltage Modular jacks are exclusively an input or an output.

To clarify this, when a jack is clicked and held to patch a cable, jacks not available as destinations are grayed out.

That said, cables can be patched in either direction - in other words, CA doesn't care if the connection is initiated on the input jack or output jack side. In the screenshot above, Oscillator 1's square wave output is being patched, causing all of other output jacks to temporarily gray out, with all input jacks available as potential destinations.

Selecting Cable Colors- There are a couple of ways to select cable colors.