PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I have a pulsar with plus plate, a scope with plus place and a scope with z-link plate. I also have an A16U but recently have bought some more outboard fx units and a few analog synths, but have run out out inputs on the A16U and the other analog ins on the scope plates. I was therefore thinking about getting a patchbay but after reading some threads on here it occured to me to just get another A16U and connect all the outs for my outboard to the ins on the second A16U which would also leave me some spare ins for the future. Then the idea would be if I needed to route a signal to several fx units, I could, for example, go from A16U out to fx unit 1 input then back to A16U in for that unit then back to out for next fx unit, then back into A16U in from that fx units output until finally its ready to go back into the Scope mixer. The question is would this sort of routing degrade the signal quite a bit or would it be a negligible issue? If so would it just be better to use a patchbay and keep the signal analog between the various connections until its ready to go back into Scope via the A16U converter.

Any ideas or examples how other users are using their outboard would be appreciated. I realise that there are probably various ways to do the same sort of thing, but I think its better to try and figure out the best possible way to do this before I end up buying more gear that ends up being wrong. Also form my main purposes the FX units I am talking about are a reverb unit, an EQ unit and a Compressor, but I might add one or 2 other outboard gear in the future, so it would also be good to keep it flexible. I like the idea of just using scope to route all the ins and out to a second A16U but if its going to degrade the signal alot then perhaps its best to just set up a patchbay.

Thanks chaps

good question...
depends a bit on your specific use - i.e. if you experiment a lot and re-patch frequently, you need a rather sophisticated mechanical construction and high-quality cables. Not that cheap and somewhat inconvenient ...

haven't you tried a 'fake patch test' yet ?
send a signal to the A16U and connect several stages of the converter's input/output directly (leaving out the FX boxes)
check to which degree the received signal is degraded
take care that send and return level match to avoid prejudice towards the louder signal
for full spectrum (and transient) coverage I'd use a slap bass sequence

cheers, Tom

i still use a patchbay with very short cabling to go from rear to front, so that all my connections are available in the front of the rack near my console's tt bay. this works well and is pretty good sonically, the loss is negligible with high quality cables and a good bay. if you have the money, more i/o makes it so that you have to do less patching overall, so another A16 would be great if you're not too broke.

Thanks for the replies garyb and astroman. I haven't tried a proper 'fake' test yet although I have run the signal in and out a couple of times and it sounded fine. But I guess if the signal is being sent back and forth between the A16U and the outboard gear more than a few times it is bound to affect it to some extent. I did read some thread on planetz where someone had done a test running it like dozens of times in and out of the A16U and I do remember they were very impressed with the comparison of the original and final signal. But I cant find that thread again.

I dont think I will be patching out too frequently though, mostly will be to get the signal into Scope from some analog synths, then using mostly scope based fx with a few outboard fx, ie reverb, and finally coming back out of scope for the outboard EQ, and compressor, on the mix bus, before going back into scope as final mixdown

I hope that makes sense. As I say alot of this is still a new area to me as everything I did directly in scope before. The outboard units I have are quite decent though so I dont think they will be detrimental to the final mix, once I get used to them And as you say garyb the A16U would leave me with a few more inputs spare than getting the 48 way patchbay.

While I am thinking about it, some of the analog outputs from my outboard synths are unbalanced, but I seem to recall that unbalanced outputs can still be connected to balanced inputs on the A16U and there is no need to change the jumpers for the A16U where those connections are connected, i.e. channel input 1-8. Is that correct, or is it better to keep the balanced and unbalanced inputs seperated on their own bus..on A16U it can be 1-8 or 9-16 as set by the jumpers.

Thanks again for your help chaps.

Tim