Or, this could be the simple problem that befalls all old, under-used patch panels (yes, including
ADC). The jacks get dirty (oxidized) and do not work reliably anymore. If you liberally douse the beast in Caig
DeoxIT, and then exercise the jacks by plugging and unplugging a
cord into each about a dozen times, it might work for awhile.
With so many better alternatives available now, I avoid installing patch panels at all cost. They are laborious to install and a major pain until the day they get ripped out.
TL / DR Warning FIRMLY IN PLACE!
Two comments:
1 - Remember the little plug-shaped 'injector / burnishers' with the hole down their
axial centre-line leading to a couple of cross-drilled exits at key points? You plugged them in from the front, inserted the tubular nozzle of your favorite pressurized spray cleaner, gave it two quick shots then, while rotating the 'injector / burnisher between your thumb and fingers, simultaneously pulled and pushed it forth and back in a vain attempt to clean / deoxidize the impossible to reach normalling contacts?
(Holy run-on sentence Bat Man!)
And then there were the appreciably smaller 'Bantam Jacks' putting twice the jacks in the same rack space with more than twice the same old problems. Yeah, they made tiny wee 'injector / burnishers' for the Bantams too.
2 - When I was younger, I was far more willing to dive headlong into 'tilting at windmills'.
Fresh from 13 years maintaining a commercial AM station's downtown studios, and their associated patch bays, along with a pair of ancient 1 RU bays in their non-climate controlled / spiderweb and
bug infested concrete transmitter building in a grassy, out of town, hill top field where spiders, bugs and patchbays never learned to cohabitate successfully; I left town moving to Stratford to become the 'head of sound' for their main
venue.
Stratford was different: When I arrived, I was first introduced to a gentleman from IA 357 who'd, after two phone calls, wanted to at least meet me
face to
face after managing to drag me there as the only potentially qualified IA member they could commandeer and offer to management who were trying to
usher in a youthful, non-IA, home studio owner with zero theatrical experience. First was an office meeting with the
Production Manager after which I was paraded to another office and, one at a time, 'sacrificed' to the Director of Music and the Music Administrator (as amongst my duties would be the multi-track recording and editing of originally composed orchestral music). After having met management in offices, I was finally permitted to see the booth. Their main booth was a low-ceilinged / high-floored black cubbyhole roughly 8' x 8'.
Let me touch on ergonomics here: Imagine a space that small where you opened the door outward and immediately 'tippy-toed over a thickmaze of un-labelled cables to reach your seat in the midst of the cable piles. The window to the
stage was 90 degrees to your left. The main
console (a massive, custom designed and built, Ward Beck, fully balanced, 12 in x 24 out matrix
console with nary a mic input in sight and an
array of 288, 5/8" square buttons) in front of you. One Tannoy Belvedere
monitor on the floor playing into your right thigh. The other, totally different and supposedly stereo,
monitor hung high on the wall behind you above the entrance door. A Scully 280 1/2" four
track (each
channel of electronics occupied 2, full width units of rack space) off your right elbow. A Scully 280 1/4" two
track on a shelf above the
console along with two unbalanced cassette recoder / players. A home style Revox (with
RCA outs) physically balanced precariously atop something to your left and largely obscuring your view of the
stage. Toss in an original Studiomaster 8 x 4 submixer, a Charlie Richmond 8 x 2 sub, a small stack of about 5 of the little
Shure M63 EQ's, M67 and M68 mic mixers and you'd just met the mic pre's for reinforcing the live, out of sight above the
stage,
orchestra. Add a 44RU rack housing 13 of
Crown's (3RU) D150 dual
channel power amps and you had the 26 channels for the Ward Beck's 24 outputs with the remaining 2 channels to
power the monitors.
Realize, other than a minimal number of proper patch points housed within the main
console, THERE WASN'T ANY SANE MEANS OF PATCHING ANYWHERE IN SIGHT. Other than the Ward Beck's outputs routing over to the amp rack via a single, large, Elco multi-pin; the entire rig was a textbook example of how not to conveniently position, let alone interconnect, gear. It was a total 'lash-up' of temporary cables, adapters ordered in from the local, downtown, 'high-end' audiophool store. Unbalanced gear interfaced to balanced gear in a total mish-mash of home-brew adapters with nary a
transformer in sight and they wondered why they were hearing taxi radios when cabs delivered patrons to the front entrance. Honestly!
Prior to the beginning of every performance, the
FOH manager assigned two ushers, with rain coats when necessary, to patrol the drop-off lane with flags and flashlights to ward off any taxis delivering late arrivals. They routinely did the same thing if there was ever a need to summon an ambulance during a performance.
How did it come to look like this and WHY?
They did their MAJOR revamp, introducing electronics to their TOTALLY acoustic space in 1970. They'd NEVER had a Head Of Sound position in their IA contracts! They didn't need one when they began in the tent in '53. When they initially built their actual building it was designed as a totally acoustic space; no vocal reinforcement, no orchestral reinforcement. All EFX were 'performed' live by a negotiated cross-blending of IA
stage hands, Equity performers and AFofM musicians. Effects ranged from thunder sheets and various sized wind machines all the way down to musicians lightly running dampened fingers around the rims of wine glasses and LARGE metal bowls to create howling noises in the pre-synth days of the early 1950's. (As an aside: Even during my time there beginning in '77, they'd have me add a mic in some back
stage corner to reinforce one or two wine glasses being 'played' by whichever cast members weren't on
stage at the moment.) Once they'd begun their foray into the brave new world of open reel tape, electronics and amplification; they began with the director of music and the
production manager negotiating with the IA to bring in whomever they could 'hornswoggle' into coming aboard for which ever production, or productions, they were planning to use the equipment for in their ROTATING rep'. Few seriously qualified people were willing to relocate to Stratford for as few as two or three performances in any given week whenever their production came up in the rep'. Year after year, season after season, on a per production basis, people arrived, lashed together whatever they could muster, prayed the audience noise would hide the hums 'n hisses, did their penance and moved on out of town. (Where was Derek to advise me against graduating into the 'big time' when I could've used him?) When they sweet-talked me into driving up for an interview, they didn't have a full time sound position in their IA contract. They began by asking how many productions, or which productions, I might be willing to consider whereas I'd presumed I was to be interviewed for, and offered, their full season, if not a full year, position. They eased into negotiations with 'some shows only run the first half of the season and then you could
escape. Others only the latter half of the season whereas as still others (Cringe) would run the entire season but, once they were rehearsed and open, you'd have to trek back 'n forth to Stratford for fewer performances per week once the entire season's productions were all up and running in the full rep'. They'd never before had a naive fool like me show up and suggest I was willing to take on the whole shebang from the beginning of rehearsals
clear through to the final performance of the season. Thus I began my "seasonal" employment. By the end of the closing performance, as I'd occupied my free moments maintaing and improving their extensive
cue-light system. Reworking their four
channel Electro
Vox intercom
system originally conceived by its manufacturer as something created to sit on secretaries' office desks, along with many other little 'ergonomic' improvements as anyone would want in any broadcast control room and / or production studio and or pro' recording studio. At season's end, when the place cleared out to a nigh on vacant space, I asked if they'd mind my keeping me on for one more week to wrap up a few loose ends.
In one and two week increments, they kept me on permitting me a two week
escape before beginning the next season's prep' week. NO WONDER THEIR BOOTH, AND SYSTEMS, HAD DESCENDED TO SUCH A STATE.
To FINALLY drag this around to patchbays:
Over the course of three or four seasons, KNOWING what a PIA jackfield / patchbays of the days had been during my 13 years in broadcast, I settled on designing, fabricating and installing a totally
XLR patch from scratch. This was appreciably before people like Middle Atlantic were offering pre-punched rack panels, let alone
Neutrik coming out with
panel mount males and females that mounted in the same size holes with matching mounting points. No; males went in 3/4" holes while females required 15/16th " holes. Mounting holes for males were on each
connector's vertical centerline while female's mounting holes were skewed on an angle. Think
Switchcraft D3F's and D3M's here. There was no space in the "shoe box" for any of the available racks of the day. A nearby, heavy steel, fab' shop thought they may be able to
bend up, and weld, the fold-down hinged front paneled box design in something as thin as just shy of EIGHTH INCH THICK STEEL PLATE. This was "paper thin" in their world but; as they were in town, WANTED to do it for us and gave us a far better price than an out of town shop who'dve whipped it up in a much saner
gauge, the Festival sprang for the box. Myself and another fine IA brother spent more than a day meticulously transferring my
hand drafted paperwork to the ridiculously heavy
gauge front panel followed by several days carefully drilling centre holes and mounting holes by
HAND (as the front panel's hinge was WELDED to the box which was far bigger and heavier than could be accurately located AND supported by any of the shop's several drill presses. It took another couple of days to accurately position the hydraulic Greenlee and hand-pump it through ALL of those (Damn) centre holes. By the time the box was positioned and secured on the wall, all of the cables routed in, organized to
roll nicely with the hinge rather than 'hard-bending', meticulously dressed, routed, stripped, heat-shrunk, pre-tinned, impeccably terminated and tested: The IA made a lot of money installing this box. Front panel labeling was accomplished with custom fabricated engraved Lamicoid continuous strips running across the full width of the box above each row of connectors so you could read the labels without having to lift a mated
connector's cable to read its designation. A small mountain of 3' - ish patch cables were
hand assembled in
house along with a couple of dozen shorter cables only required to work within the upper few rows where the designated
mic level section was located. The Festival actually sprung for a 27 pair, installation grade,
multi-cable to replace the totally absurd collection of random lengths of individual cables of differing types (solid and stranded conductors of varying gauges with at least four types of shields) extended 'helter skelter' spliced with anything from unsoldered twists and tape, through Marrettes and butt-splices (appreciate these were all operating at
mic level for about 150' through the attic area lighting coves and their delightfully tuneful
SCR dimmers by the time they'd wended their way from the
orchestra loft out of sight above the
stage)
And they wondered why the mic lines buzzed.
When the
XLR patch was complete, it was neat, tidy and legibly labelled. Everything worked. Taxi cabs were no longer a threat and NOTHING hummed.
It was all there and working flawlessly when a new lady entered my life and I left the virtually year round position behind in favor of a seasonal gig driving a multi
track facility in their Avon's basement. The person who followed me was from a recording environment in Toronto. The first thing he told them was the
XLR patch HAD to be replaced with a traditional
RTS jackfield. To keep costs down, they went with a Canadian product from Farrtronics. A few seasons later, when the new lad quit mid season, I was pressured into returning to
pick up a full rep' in mid season. Dropping into any established production, cold turkey in mid run can really raise your adrenaline but at least your facing the same production 8 times per week. Try dropping into 8. or more, different productions running in rep' where they're performing up to 10 performances weekly with cross-cast individual Equity members maxing at their contractual 8 per week limit. If you want to seriously raise your adrenaline try picking up a 10 or 12 show rep' when every day's a different show, the matinee's are never the same as the evenings and days pass before your first show comes around again. Doing this in the multiple open reel, pre digital
console era really got your heart pumping, separated the 'wheat from the chaff' and the posers from the pro's.
Oh! The new
patchbay kicker was I discovered, and tracked down, an intermittent in the
RTS style patch my replacement just HAD to have. It wasn't any fault of Farrtronics. An IA lx who'd been pressed into soldering the field wiring connections had looped one
conductor of a balanced pair through an eyelet and left it there UNSOLDERED.
"FMEng" is spot on with his assessment of patch bays in our
current times.
I've gotta quit posting meandering, off topic, novellas like this before I'm confused with my old on-line aquaintance Brian; the "ship" that sailed me into this forum in the first place.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.
