Signex patchbays are designed & made in the UK. The Signex product line offers a range of patchbay options to suit every budget and application, from the home studio to the pro recording studio through to broadcast quality patchbays.

Signex patchbays are made in Britain by Signex Ltd and for over 20 years that is all they have been making. There are now thousands of Signex patchbays in daily use with broadcasters and studios in Australia and around the world. To the best of our knowledge Signex has a 100% perfect reliability record over the 9 years the product has been sold in Australia.

At Studio Solutions, we use Signex patchbays in all our installation work and have found them to be no-fuss, high-reliability products, so we're more than happy to recommend them for your studio.

Which is the right Signex patchbay for your application?

For the project studio, we recommend... the > QPP-48S, also known as the Q-Patch::

For long-term, heavy-duty usage, we recommend...the > CPJ-48T and the > CPT96-D25

For special applications, we recommend... the CPU-16 Universal Panel (not yet listed here)

Midi users will appreciate the CPM-22 MIDI patch-panel (not yet listed here)

For fully automated patching, we recommend... the > ARC-32 Smartpatch

Selecting a patchbay

How do you go about selecting the right patchbay for your purposes, especially if you are building a studio for the first time? What are the issues involved in the selection of a patchbay?

For broadcasters, long-term reliability is the key issue, followed by speed of installation and finally price. For studios, the criteria are similar but more equally balanced. Studio applications change frequently, so flexibility becomes important - keep your options open with a patchbay that provides the ability to accommodate change over a 10 year minimum useful life. You'll notice that all our Signex patchbays are balanced, and this is for a very good reason. Avoid unbalanced patchbays. Even if you are starting your first studio project and are using unbalanced equipment, an unbalanced patchbay will completely limit your upgrade options and, of course, force any balanced lines that you do have to work unbalanced.

The major cost of any patching system is not the patchbay itself, but the labour to plan, label, fabricate & test the cable looms, and the associated cabling and connector costs. We know this because we regularly wire up studios. We think Signex offers the best price/performance ratio.