dbx PB-48 48-Point 1/4" Patchbay

The DBX PB48 is a pretty standard but decent patch bay for your 1/4" patching purposes. I've had two. The first one had several connections die on me after just a year of use. I got another one and that one lasted much longer, never dying on me. There is no coloration to the sound and it performs as it should barring any dead connections. I like how shallow it is in a rack space and that it is relatively inexpensive.

Not very well designed. The cards are held on only by one nylon jack nut that fits into a slot, pointing down. Plus the only shielding is on top. Otherwise the whole frame is open. Ok if you want to stick with half-normal configuration. Full-normal is not an option. De-normaled, or straight through can be done but it is a real pain. The cards all have to be swapped and removing the jack nuts is tough because they are too close together for even a thin walled socket and too close for an open end wrench. You have to use pliers. Remember they are nylon and the only thing holding the cards in. I took one look at all that and returned both units. I replaced them with the Behringer bays, which surprisingly were much better designed and fully shielded.

I bought the dbx PB-48 patchbay a little while back after learning about patchbays in general. I upgraded to a high quality two channel AD/DA converter and was worried about plugging and unplugging my instruments in the converter. I tried using a cheap mixer but it introduced noise in the signal. A high quality, multi-channel mixer can run pretty expensive and I found out about this, dbx's version specifically. This patchbay has allowed me to be very flexible and change the recording chain (passively) with ease, and often as I never record more than one instrument at a time. Its got great solid connections. This has made my life very easy and will make the connections on my AD/DA converter last.