Nice set up there. I may pick your brain as to how you hooked up the patch bay. I'm a new 388 owner myself and am finally started to acquire some outboard gear. I have the old DBX 163 with wood panels as well.
Brian
It took more trial and error than it should have, mostly because I get these great ideas and then I'm just lazy...
The back of my 388 is pretty much like this:
*XLR jack panel in my wall that feeds 8 cables to the 8 mic pres (ch 1-8). This is for plugging in on the studio side, as I have a separate control room
*Each channel has ACCESS send/rcv jacks. I plugged each of these (16 total) into my Tascam patchbay. The best I can tell you on this is that they needed to be plugged into the "un-switched" side of the patchbay, because they are already half-normalled inside the 388 (or something like that). That is why you see that half my bay has white jacks and the other side is red. The red ones are un-switched, so I reversed 4 of the modules for the other half. I plugged the sends into the top row and the recv into the bottom row. To make my life easier, I used a 1/4" to RCA snake for 4 of the channels, but then for the other 4 I had to go buy individual Hosa 1/4" to RCA dual cables because no one had a freaking snake in stock. I strapped all of those to the existing snake and it's fine. I labeled each cable so I didn't have to guess later on. That took what seemed like hours but was so worth it. What I just did was bring my ACCESS send/recv jacks to the front of the patchbay.
*DBX compressors, Lexicon effects - these had to be plugged into the "switched" side of the bay (white) so I did the same thing, Outputs on the top, Inputs on the bottom for each compressor and effect. My DBX 164 is running in mono so I have both inputs connected on a Y-cable and one output used (per the manual).
*The BBE thing is not patched into the bay, rather I ran the stereo outputs from the 388 directly to the BBE and then from there the BBE goes to my Firepod inputs. That's just for the 388 stereo mix when I import it into Logic, and honestly never even used it yet - may not have to.
*The main CR outputs from my Firepod go back to the stereo inputs on the 388 so I can hear my computer audio back through the mixer. Monitor outputs feed to my 2 monitors using RCA to 1/4" adapters.
So now I can just patch the compressors and Lexicon into channels using the front of the patchbay. I prefer not to use the effects/aux sends because those don't print to tape, and I really don't care for doing effects only on mixdown to digital. A bit more final but it forces me to make choices.
