A bit more than just plugging it in...

[Dave Boulden]

The more gear you use, the more you find you need to get a bit more intricate with your patching, eventually you will end up with patchbays and patch panels to bring some order to the wiring chaos. I thought I'd share what's typically involved in plugging in a new bit of gear into a semi-pro home studio.

The item in question is the TLA Ivory 2 5052 that I've just bought. It's going to sit in a floor standing rack that is adjacent to, but not attached to, my main work desk where mixer is installed. This means I'm going to have to run cabling between the two racks. A quick count of inputs, outputs and inserts for this bit of kit plus two outputs from my FiveFish preamp means I'm going to need a minimum of 12 balanced lines. Rather Fortunately my band had a suitable long off-cut of 12 core balanced multicore. Nice!

Time to break out the soldering iron and attach 4 TRS jacks and 8 XLRs to one end:



and then combine all of these down to 6 combo XLR/Jack sockets and 2 jack plugs on the other end:



Start off with one end of the new loom in the rack where the 5052 is going to be installed:



Then you are on your hand and knees under the desk running the loom around the back of everything so that it pops up and out through the in-console rack amongst the rest of the patchbays and tie-line patch panels next to the mixer. You also need to take care to cable-tie individual lines together to keep things as tidy as possible:



Pop the patch panel back in the rack, break out the Dymo and label the sockets:



Finally, install the 5052 in it's allotted place in the rack, now fully cabled in to the central patch bays. Now it's simply a case of plugging in a few patch cables to be able to utilise the 5052 for whatever task is at hand... be that as a preamp for tracking, as a buss compressor, as a limiter or as an outboard EQ.



Job done (thank f**k for that!)

[tehlord]

One day I want to be just like you.

Play misty for me

[I_Am_Bic_Pentameter]

Dave, you have to share the National Grid with everybody else and not just use it all for your own ends

[TrevCircleStudios]

Originally Posted by I_Am_Bic_Pentameter

Dave, you have to share the National Grid with everybody else and not just use it all for your own ends

In the spirit of glass houses and stones... I'm saying nowt!

[Dave Boulden]

Originally Posted by TrevCircleStudios

In the spirit of glass houses and stones... I'm saying nowt!

[JAYDMF]

Good work. ive just shared the same pain of cabling. everythings in and roughly tidy but still some work to do as you can see

[modz1]

Instant stickiesville!