I hope this helps.
If you plan to physically make connections with patch cables you will solder your balanced cable to the 3 main lugs. Top is ground, middle cold, bottom hot(most often). If your unsure of the pinout then use your continuity checker on a bantam cable and solder lugs. The other 2 lugs are for normalling. You have 4 choices when it comes to normalling a patchpoint.
1 is not to normall at all. This is what I described if you want to manually patch everything.
2nd type is the full normal. Full normal means that the connection will be broken from either side that you plug into. Usually you'll full normal things like room lines to pre's. Although many will tell you to not put your pre's on a bantam style bay. To accomplish the full normal make your equipment connections as described above and add jumpers from the extra two solder lugs on both connections.
Half normal down and half normal up breack connections when one of the two patch points are connected. For example my line outs are half normalled to my tape deck so that when I patch into the tape any incoming normalled signal is broken. Example. Lineout of console is halfnormalled to tape. This means without pathcing anything line 1 will go to track 1 on tape. If I patch into the line 1 out jack the signal is still going to track 1. I could pathc from line 1 into track 2 and Ill still get line 1 on track 1 as well as track 2 now. On the other hand, if I want line out 2 to go to track 1 and I patch it in this way the normal will be broken to track 1.
Half normals are made by connecting the normals to the main lugs. In the example above I would wire on the top row my Line outs on the bottom the 2" deck. The line outs would be wired to the regular ground, hot cold lugs as would the tape ins. This time you will connect the jumpers from the main lugs for the line out and the jumpers to the normalling lugs on the tape input. I have found its much easier to prep your normals by wiring them with the equipment wiring. In other words they can be a major pain in the ass if you try to connect the equip first then normal things.
While your at it make a couple of mults.
These are simply a few points that are connected to make it have one signal. On my bays I'll have a row of four or so points with all hots, colds and grounds interconnected. Mults act like this. Example. I want more bass in the mix but I have very little room on the fader to keep pumping it up. Patch bass playback to a mult. Now all of the jacks in the mult become the bass signal. Now I already have one on the console because of my normalling so I simply patch out of a 2nd of the mult point to the console giving me anoher bass signal. Remember you won't want to mult instrument or mic signals as they are way to weak to get good results from.
Good luck,
I'll try to post a couple of shots of my bays if you still need them.
Will
July 22, 2019, 01:22:30 PM