Patchfield, Normalized bay | Behringer MX9000 manual

8. THE PATCHFIELD

Nomenclature clarification:

s FIELD	= entire patching area
s BAY	= a unit of 48 jack sockets arranged as 24 outs over 24 ins

If you really want to make the most of your home studio, invest in a patchfield. We know that you will often put off doing a complex patch if there is no patchfield:

1)because it’s so much bother and

2)in case you inadvertently damage or pull out a lead.

8.1 The normalized bay

Most decent jackbays offer two rows of 24 normalized jacks in a 1 U of rack space. Lucky you’ve got a 24/48 channel desk, eh? The term normalized refers to the fact that the top row (outputs) are internally connected to the bottom row (inputs), unless you plug something into an input socket. Plugging into the output socket of a normalized insert pair does not break the internal connection, but it does provide an alternative direct output. Where normalizing is not wanted on a patchbay (there are a few cases!) it is possible to remove it by cutting certain PCB tracks. Refer to the patchbay instructions for how to do this.

8.2 The patchfield

If you want to do the only decent thing and construct a patchfield for your studio, here’s how to do it. Note that we have laid it out in order that a minimum number of cables are likely to be needed. We have also completely left out the microphone inputs. Unlike everything else, these operate at a level several orders of magnitude lower than line (+4 dBu or -10 dBV). It is best to plug microphones directly into the EURODESK MX9000, or via special XLR-type wall boxes connected to the EURODESK microphone inputs by a good quality balanced (2-core + screen) multicore. (See also section 12 “(UN)BALANCED LINES”.)

Break the normalizing on this bay.

Tie lines: usually, in a MIDI setup, racks and keyboards etc. are scattered around the control room. Plugging these directly into the front of the patchbay would result in Spaghetti Junction. Instead, it is better to connect TIE LINE jacks to wall boxes strategically positioned near to where MIDI hardware congregates.

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It’s always good to have a few 4-way links around for splitting signals up to 3 ways (one in, three out). E.g. one tape track has four different instruments on it. Patch the DIRECT out of its CHANNEL into a 4-way split, returning to a further 3 channels via LINE INPUT. Set up each of the paralleled 4 channels for one instrument, and use mutes (preferably MIDI controlled) to mute the 3 unwanted channels at any one time).

+Break the NORMALIZING LINKS on positions 21 - 24. Note also that the MIX-B outputs are adjacent to the aux sends. This is because one of the two functions of MIX-B (source switches set to CHANNEL) is to provide an extra stereo aux send.

+You can treat MIX-B as two mono sends using GAIN for level and PAN for blending. Setting pan to the center will give a 50/50 ratio of the “aux 7” and “aux 8” effect, hard left 100% “aux 7”, etc.

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Break NORMALIZING LINKS here. If you’ve got more than 5 or 6 stereo dynamics/EQ processors, you might spill over onto another dedicated bay, or alternatively have to find some suitable extra space somewhere else in the patchfield. Remember, most dynamics processors also have sidechain/KEY inputs, and therefore require 3 holes per channel.

+Enhancers are usually applied across INSERTS like compression and EQ etc., but most BEHRINGER enhancers have a SOLO mode, in which they can be addressed via an aux send and blended back into the main mix like any other reverb.