Hi, well, first off my name is Roob, how yall doin.
listen here, i don't care who your fancy microphone is, if ya aint got a solid drummer and a well built, well tuned kit, you might as well be mikin it with a ham sandwich.
here is how i like to think of it. the microphone is like the engine of a car. and the preamplifier is the batter of the bread, but the instrument is the bowl in which you stir your bread. if your bowl is made of shit, it will leek into the bread, no? and the player is the spatula -- if the spatula is made of shit, it will leek into the bread, no?
so you can talk about microphone bullshit all day or you can ask interesting questions.
is the patchbay dead? discuss.

<got a bit petulant there..forgive me>

Nobody is suggesting that excellent records are made by anything other than excellent musicians, ‘fancy’ microphones do not compensate for shoddy performances - good equipment however is vital in making outstanding recordings which is the sole aim of a studio, hence the interest in microphones and their application. They are as central to a recording engineer as a socket set it so a mechanic.

i'd reply to that, but i lost you at "gratitous." ANYWAY I'll just not so suttely nudge this convo in the direction of the topic at hand, that is, patchbays. I'm not so sure there is a place for them in the modern recording studio. yes i have heard the age old arguments that they will never die, they sound better than patching direct, but my ears don't lie and i don't have a boner.
discuss.

if you stick your patch cables into poop, they will get dirty, and probably sound...shitty.

I suppose... if you can justify putting in a router. I would still put in a patchbay in-line with the router so you can bypass the router when it goes down.

By router do you mean "switch"?

We have a 24 port switch here that I plug connections from our patchbay into. I could just have easily skipped the router and went straight into the switch, but it's nice to know that I have the patchbay there if I need it.

Patchbays seem to be one of those things that you can live without, but it's really great if you have one and you're in a pinch.

Rueben wrote:i'd reply to that, but i lost you at "gratitous." ANYWAY I'll just not so suttely nudge this convo in the direction of the topic at hand, that is, patchbays. I'm not so sure there is a place for them in the modern recording studio. yes i have heard the age old arguments that they will never die, they sound better than patching direct, but my ears don't lie and i don't have a boner.
discuss.

Modern studio as in ProTools? Are you talking about bypassing patchbays by tying your gear into a router? Even if you are using a router, you need to have a patchbay so that aren't crawling behind the rouer to finish your session after you lose your router tables? Why would anyone want patchbays to die? I've had to work in a studio at HBO that didn't have them and it was a royal pain-in-the-ass to troubleshoot router problems without a patchbay.

what exactly are you referring to when you say "router"? is this a pro tools device?

Rueben wrote: I'm not so sure there is a place for them in the modern recording studio. yes i have heard the age old arguments that they will never die, they sound better than patching direct, but my ears don't lie and i don't have a boner.
discuss.

What do you mean by patching direct? That implies you're using a patch bay. Are you comparing normalled connection within a patch bay to using a patch cable to go from point to point?
In any case, the ideal audio (and digital signal) path would have no connections other than at the output of point A and the input of point B. All additional connections including patchbay punch-blocks, normals, and patch cables degrade the signal path to some extent. You have to balance the good with the bad in this case. If you clean your patch bay properly and consistently you can minimize any problems.

chad wrote:what exactly are you referring to when you say "router"? is this a pro tools device?

A router is a patching device that uses a digital interface to create connections, rather than patch cables. They are common in large digital studios and television where finding a crosspoint on racks of patchbays could end up taking hours. Nvision makes a most popular one, but digital studio equipment is a little off-topic for this forum, I think.