DIY XLR Patchbay

  • Thread starter Thread starter stepXinXtheXmix
  • Start date Start date
It depends somewhat on what you mean by "patchbay." You could mean either (a) just a basic panel that, effectively, moves some jacks from the back of various items mounted in your rack to a panel on the front or (b) something more like a typical patchbay, with breakable normals.

Basic Panel

A basic panel is pretty easy. I priced out the parts for one with eight connectors (several years ago) at a bit under $50. In the end, I found a guy online who made one to my spec for only a little more than the parts would've cost me. He also sells parts at a good price:
https://www.vafamsound.com/
The most obvious (to me, anyway) other source for parts would be Markertek.

If you go with a basic panel, the smart way (it seems to me) to build it is to use one set of panel-mount connectors mounted to a rack panel with 3 or 4 feet of cable attached to each in back, terminating in an appropriate connector. In other words: I don't see any purpose for having a whole box with jacks in front and back, as in the example in your eBay link. That's just a waste of connectors and cable. Also, the box in your link is kind of squirelly in that it seems to have female XLRs on both sides, which breaks the "standard" of using females for inputs and males for outputs. You're going to wind up needing weird cables (male-male) on one side or the other.

The basic purpose of mine is to move the inputs of mic preamps to the front of the rack. So: it has 8 female panel-mount XLR connectors mounted to the panel, each with a few feet of cable ending in a male XLR connector that's plugged into a mic preamp input. I didn't bother with combo XLR-TRS jacks, because I only use it for mics, with which I just use ordinary mic cables. To my mind, it was a good idea to keep the whole panel mic-level, which avoids any possibility of getting confused and connecting something at line level to an input that's expecting a mic level signal (which can produce dramatic results). The guy who made them did very tidy work, with the cables in back identified by color using resistor color codes.

The thing in your eBay link seems to be a basic panel, though with an unnecesary box and second set of jacks in back

Full-Function Patchbay

This gets a good bit more elaborate. You'd need to find jacks that have a normal that interupts when you plug something in. TRS jacks that do that are easy to find ... XLRs, not so much. I don't know that I've seen such a jack, though it may exist. It'd pretty much need to be female, which is another issue, although it would be consistent with a half-normalled scheme, where you'd only need to interupt the inputs. If I were building such a thing, I'd make it half-normalled, and have cables coming out the back, rather than an unnecessary second set of jacks.
 
If you look at the website I linked above and click on "Custom Panel Assemblies," there are tons of examples of various configurations. Mine is 10-A, which looks woefully simple compared to some of them.
 
Further expansion of my thoughts above:

- If what you're wanting is a fully-functional patchbay with normals, for routing line-level signals, I would steer clear of XLRs altogether, and go with the usual 1/4" TRS, telephone plugs, TT or whatever.

- If what you're wanting is to connect mics to mic preamps, I don't really see why you need normals. I mean: the mics aren't mounted in your rack anyway, but are running around out in the room somewhere. The easiest way to deal with them is just to plug them in to a panel with female jacks wired in back to preamp inputs. You could include male (output) jacks on your panel and wire them to mic cables coming out the back of the rack, but I don't really see the point (and you're going to need to find, or invent, XLR jacks with breakable normals).

- If you want something that mixes both purposes in a single patchbay, I'd avoid that. In addition to accidentally misconnecting levels (as mentioned above), you also have to worry about phantom power.
 
DITTO ^^^^^^^

That's the right way to do it.

XLRs for mic outputs, tied to preamp inputs, and seperate from the Line I/O patchbays, which are done with 1/4" or TT connections.
 
sjjohnston said:
Further expansion of my thoughts above:

- If what you're wanting is a fully-functional patchbay with normals, for routing line-level signals, I would steer clear of XLRs altogether, and go with the usual 1/4" TRS, telephone plugs, TT or whatever.

- If what you're wanting is to connect mics to mic preamps, I don't really see why you need normals. I mean: the mics aren't mounted in your rack anyway, but are running around out in the room somewhere. The easiest way to deal with them is just to plug them in to a panel with female jacks wired in back to preamp inputs. You could include male (output) jacks on your panel and wire them to mic cables coming out the back of the rack, but I don't really see the point (and you're going to need to find, or invent, XLR jacks with breakable normals).

- If you want something that mixes both purposes in a single patchbay, I'd avoid that. In addition to accidentally misconnecting levels (as mentioned above), you also have to worry about phantom power.
Click to expand...

I have a 16 channel snake coming from my live room. I'm wanting to take the fan out and come in the back of the XLR patch bay and come out TRS to my full TRS patch bay that has my interface, compressors, preamps, etc. patched into it.
 
I can't help with selected suppliers since I suspect I don't live in the same country as you but a couple of general comments.

First off, if you have any mic level sources going through the patch (and you mention inputs to pre amps), do NOT use TRS. Phantom power and TRS don't get on well since, unlike XLR, the two live carriers make contact at different times. I've always standardised on XLR for mic level and TRS (either A or B gauge) for line level.

Normalling keeps everything a lot more tidy if you have connections that are, well, normal. However, it makes your wiring rather more tricky (but far from impossible).

Although the single RU unit you have in your picture can work, the standard it to have at least two rows, sources on top and destinations on the bottom. This also fits in with the mention of normalling above.

You have to consider how you will connect to the back of the panel. In a professional set up, the rear of the panel is unlikely to have physical connectors; rather, the incoming and outgoing lines are generally soldered or punched directly onto the connectors. A tie rail takes the strain off this.
 
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