Grounding my patchbay

Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2008 8:04 pm

i just picked up a neutrik NYS-SPP-L1 stereo patch panel. it came with a bag of grounding clips and i dont know what channels to apply them to.i have a neutrik NYS-SPP-L patchbay as well and that one didnt come with grounders. can anyone explain to me the difference in the two? can someone explain as well to me which types of electronics would need to be grounded and when these grounders apply to the individual channels?

Thanks in advance

Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 4:32 am

Your simple questions can yield huge examples & reasons.

In an unbalanced control room, you're likely to find your front panel 1/4" connectors grounded through to the rear connector.

In the balance configuration, you may find that the front ground sleeve for the 1/4" connector does not have a common ground to the rear incoming ground. This is to eliminate ground loops and because in certain applications, you would only be patching balanced gear whose signal is carried by pins 2 & 3. The ground is simply used as an additional shield that does not necessarily carry any audio as unbalanced shields do.

So you order patch bays configured for your planned wiring scheme. As you know now, not all patch bays are created equally.

For instance, my control room was pulled out of an NBC control room, essentially. Part of the wiring harness & patch bays were kept intact. None of the front panel 1/4" ground sleeves are connected to anything! The rear of the patch bays were grounded to a 1/4" thick by 3 inch-wide copper bus bar that ran throughout the building. That wasn't an option for my control room so I've had to do some rewiring for specific functional needs. Such as running a piece of bus wire across all of the 1/4" ground sleeves to the console chassis ground. This allows me to patch invarious outboard pieces of equipment into my line inputs whether they are balanced or unbalanced. It does require an AC ground lift at times for the ancillary equipment to prevent ground loop hum. But the rest of my Jac bays remain with ungrounded 1/4" front panel sleeves.

It's really depends on what application you're using it in.
Ms. Remy Ann David

Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 6:03 pm

i hope you dont take offense to this remy but that didnt help me out one bit except that i know now that you have a studio from nbc? i still dont know the differance between my two patch bays except for the obvious reasons. could you or someone else, in laymans terms, explain why i should need these ground clips?

Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 6:39 pm

Read it again...

Really, read it again Wink

Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 12:12 pm

im still not sure how it applies to my situation

Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 12:35 pm

I have never seen a patch bay before. But I can maybe summarise what Ms. David said.

All patch bays are created differently.
All the things you connect to the patch bay are different.

My advice would be to do what you think is best without using any grounding thingies until you come apon a problem, my guess would be ground loops you can hear would be a problem. Then you could maybe ask a question that could be answered more directly to get you all sorted out.

As to the difference between the two models, you, someone who owns both, are in a good position to find out. Maybe ask who ever made it or sells it. If thats not possible then have a look for yourself.

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