I have used a 1/4" jack patchbay for spdif for years - it works fine and it's cheap too!

Samson,

Several years ago I did something similar to what you are asking. We took a regular 1U rack plate with 16 pre drilled holes and put in RCA turnarounds. Then wired up the appropriate (very important) S/PDIF cabling and several short S/PDIF patch chords. Worked beautifully but with one limitation. Only single source to single destination patching possible. But if that is all you require, a great cost saver.

Hope this helps,

Yorik

....

Howdy

I have the cheapo MAudio DigiPatch and it works fine. If you're a DIY type, here's a general description of how to do it from Mike Rivers:

"RCA connectors will work OK for S/PDIF, but they're more likely to wear out sooner than more robust connectors - and wear is the biggest enemy of patchbays. A plastic panel (or one of those classy wood ones from Funk Logic), a handful of BNC bulkhead mounting F/F adapters, some RCA-to BNC cables to connect your devices to the panel, and some BNC-to-BNC cables to patch between jacks will do very nicely. Check http://www.mouser.com for catalog number 523-31-220N-75RFX for some
inspiration. Markertek (http://www.markerte…) has reasonably priced BNC-RCA and BNC-BNC cables. Get 75 ohm (RG-59) cables for best results."

"If you have a friendly local TV station that's junked their old video patch panels and will give you one, that'll do nicely, too, but be sure to get the cables with them. They're special and expensive."

"Of course the coolest is a routing switcher designed for digital connections, but if you're looking for something simple, inexpensive,
and obvious, go with a mechanical patchbay."

I have a 16 x 16 digital de-tangler from these guys - it works v well indeed, I bought it second hand..

http://www.z-sys.com

I wonder what the heck will happen to it if I move over to 96k...??

Any ideas?

....