Context: 11:03PM EST, back on the living room couch in Queens. It’s a tad cooler tonight – maybe because the summer season is coming to an end. I have Miles Davis’ cover of “Bye Bye Blackbird” playing in my head. There are the three versions that have persisted in my memory:

  • The original 1957 recording from his album ‘Round About Midnight.
  • A live recording from 1960 at The Olympia in Paris, with John Coltrane.
  • A cover of Miles’ cover from a gentleman who was testing out his plastic cornet at a wedding gig or something. I can’t seem to find it on YouTube or Facebook for the life of me, but his instrument sounded absolutely beautiful in the spacious hall.

I ended up listening to the recording at the Olympia. Because I love the album cover design. All is well.

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at hardware. I had dreamed of making some audio rig since I was a child. Now that I have a little spending money, I’ll try to fulfill as many of these desires as I can alongside this project.

Starting with the interface, I decided to buy a Cymatic uTrack 24. The unit comes from a relatively new company somewhere in Germany, and it seems to be an absolute gem: It’s an interface that can either work as (1) a standalone 24ch recorder, (2) a standalone 24ch playback device, or (3) a 24in 24out USB interface – and it fits in a succinct 1RU chassis and runs new for about $55012.

Like many other high channel count interfaces, the connectors are DB25’s. It’s a great type of interconnect for saving panel space and for plugging in 8 balanced channels at a time. Not so great for constantly patching sources and speakers. If I want this rear panel to survive anywhere other than dusty spaces behind racks and consoles, I’m going to need a patch bay.

I found a handful of used 48-point 1/4” TRS patchbays. While I do plan to wire some of these inputs to dedicated preamps, having the option to wire the entire 24x24 I/O in 1RU sounds beautifully compact.

I’ll just need a bunch of breakout cables on one side to get from DB25 to TRS, then TRS to XLR female/male for in/out. Here’s a block diagram to visualize what I’m thinking:

For now, I can forget about two entire input banks because I don’t anticipate using more than 8 inputs for now. So looking at 3 output banks and 1 input bank, I would need 4 DB25-TRS breakout/snake cables and 3 TRS-XLR-Male snakes.

After finding some pretty inexpensive DB25-TRS and TRS-XLR Male snakes, the totals would come out to about 150 + 70 = $220 before tax and shipping. But there’s a big problem that I didn’t think about: The DB25-TRS connection is between two units in the same rack. Even if I bought the shortest length of 2m, I’d have 8m (4 x 2m) worth of 8-channel, 3-conductor cabling for a total span of like, 1m (est. 4 x 0.3m).

Also remembering that I have 26 1/4” TRS plugs sitting in a drawer at home from some more adventurous days3, I wondered if there would be a cheaper alternative that involved taking apart and building some custom snakes. I had just ordered a new soldering iron that I’m itching to try. Here’s what I’ve gathered:

  • I can get 10 DB25 Male plugs for about $10.
  • If I buy four 8ch TRS-XLR Make snakes ($70), I can cut like a foot off from the TRS side and wire the bare ends to DB25 plugs. I now have four DB25-TRS snakes of the length I need in my rack, for connecting all three output banks and one input bank.
  • Of the remaining snakes, I can then terminate three of them with my TRS connectors to get three TRS-XLR output snakes.

This total comes out to almost $80 and some hours of soldering labor (experience, I guess), as opposed to something way higher for off the shelf snakes, with half of the length simply taking up space and weight in the rack.

  1. for those who are familiar with interfaces with a high analog I/O count, you probably know that $550 is comparatively low. For those who don’t know: $550 is comparatively low! I snagged a brand new one on Reverb for about $100 off, too. ↩

  2. I’ve also collected enough thoughts while comparing this with other high-channel-count interfaces to warrant a whole other blog post, but I’ll go into that once the unit arrives. ↩

  3. I’ve heard of phases where folks have tried out a daring hairstyle. While I didn’t have a red hair phase, I did have a “red XLR cable” phase: 8 in candy-apple red and 2 in muted purple, all with black Neutrik NCMXX’s. A true fashion statement. I also had plans to make a bunch of blue and white TRS cables, but I didn’t follow through on those (fortunately). That’s how I have my extra plugs. I’ve since mellowed down to a black and discreet cable kind of guy… ↩