Allen & Heath Xone PB Patchbay launches at Musikmesse 2010
By Paul Dakeyne
| Posted in Music Technology
The Allen and Heath Xone PB Patchbay is due for unveiling at next week’s MusikMesse 2010. It’s an important product for club owners and DJs alike – why? Read on.. It’s 1am in a dark, sweaty club and there’s arms flailing, brows perspiring and fumbling aplenty going on – but that’s not the punters on the dancefloor, it’s the DJs themselves involved in that ritual event, the ‘DJ changeover’. Most of us have partaken in this messed up moment – pulling out torches, looking for mixer connections, worried about some colourful language from the sound engineer or fellow DJ if one wrong lead gets pulled out…
Here to save the day (or night) is this 1U rack from Allen & Heath which allows DJs using DVS (digital vinyl systems), standard laptop set-ups and all other variety of gear to connect hassle-free and with extreme efficiency to the main club mixer. The Allen and Heath Xone PB allows the connection of up to four stereo audio sources on the front panel and the inputs to the mixer channels are connected to RCAs on the rear panel of the unit. A&H’s press release adds further routing details: “The front panel connections echo the outputs from the audio sources on the left side, while connections on the right provide inputs to up to four external sources. Switches on the front panel select whether the mixer inputs are connected directly to the audio sources or diverted to the external sources, allowing very quick and simple interfacing to scratch amps or computer sound-cards. The audio source connections on the front panel are duplicated, enabling two scratch amps to be connected to the same audio source for simple DJ handovers”.
The Allen and Heath Xone PB also features two Switchable Inverse RIAA Filters (which allow line level sources to be connected to the phono preamps of the mixer), ‘common mode’ noise attenuation filtering on all external inputs (which assists in reducing laptop power supply noise) and finally an earth lift switch is provided to prevent the occurrence of ground loops.
Obviously there are alternative products on the market that assist in efficient routing solutions in nightclub environments, but this new unit, from such a renowned manufacturer, which seems to tick all the right boxes and is rack-mountable, looks like a sure-fire success story from day one.
Tags: Allen & Heath, PB Patchbay, X1, Xone