Studio & Recording

Flock Audio Explained: The End of the Patch Cable?

By Jun Kit · Music Bliss | 21 October 2026 | 13 min read

You opened a mix from three weeks ago this morning. The session recalled perfectly — every plugin, every automation pass, every fader. Then you looked up at the rack, and at the patchbay underneath it, and you realised you had no idea which compressor the lead vocal went through, in what order, or whether the bus EQ was in front of the limiter or behind it. Somewhere there is a photo on your phone. Maybe.

That gap — a DAW that remembers everything and an analogue rig that remembers nothing — is the problem Flock Audio was built to close. The company makes a patchbay you drive from software: the audio stays entirely in the analogue domain, but the routing is drawn on a screen, saved with a name, and recalled in a second. This article covers what Flock Audio is, what the PATCH system actually does, how you use one day to day, where it changes a studio's workflow, and — honestly — which studios it makes sense for and which it does not.

First, the Problem: What a Patchbay Actually Costs You

A patchbay is a manual routing matrix. Your outboard gear is wired permanently into the back of it, and the front gives you a grid of sockets so you can connect any output to any input with a short cable, without crawling behind the rack. If you own more than two pieces of hardware, you need one. That much has been settled since the 1950s.

The cost is in how it behaves.

Normalling is a decision you make once and live with. Each vertical pair of sockets on a patchbay can be wired three ways. Full-normalled means the top row feeds the bottom row automatically until you plug something in. Half-normalled — the most common arrangement — means the signal appears on the top socket and continues down to the bottom one, so you can tap a signal without breaking it. Thru, or de-normalled, means the two sockets are not connected at all until you patch them. Choosing the wrong scheme for a given row is not a setting you change; on most bays it is a soldering job or a card you physically flip. Studios plan their bays for weeks and still get rows wrong.

The three normalling schemes. On a traditional bay this is a wiring decision, not a setting.

Nothing about it recalls. This is the real cost. Your DAW stores every plugin instance and every parameter. The moment a signal leaves your interface and goes into the rack, that memory stops. Reconstructing a chain from last month means notes, photographs, or guesswork, and guesswork on a mix revision is how a client ends up hearing something different from what they approved.

Every patch point is a mechanical contact. Jack contacts oxidise. Cables fail internally long before they look damaged. A crackle on an insert send at 2am is almost always a patch point or a patch cable, and finding out which costs you twenty minutes you did not have.

And it takes up space. A serious bay is several rack units of sockets plus a nest of short cables hanging off the front, in a room where rack space is the most expensive real estate you own.

None of this makes patchbays bad. They are reliable, they are repairable, and a well-planned bay is a genuinely fast instrument in experienced hands. But every one of those problems is a routing problem, and routing is the one part of the signal path that does not need to be analogue.

What Is Flock Audio?

Flock Audio is a pro audio manufacturer founded by Darren Nakonechny, a former touring musician who spent a decade on the road, moved into corporate management, then left to run his own studio. The company's origin is unusually literal. In his own words: "I needed a patch bay, but I hated them and found them archaic; I was looking for a product like PATCH and realized that it didn't exist."

So he had it built. Nakonechny brought in patent attorneys and engineering help, and the first PATCH shipped in 2018. The company started in a two-car garage, spent five years in a warehouse in Kelowna, British Columbia, and relocated to the Dallas–Fort Worth area in 2024. The underlying invention is patented under the plain-English title Analog Audio Patchbay Under Digital Control.

The adoption that followed is the part worth knowing if the name is new to you. Manny Marroquin installed one in Studio 2 at Larrabee Studios in Los Angeles, where he has mixed for over twenty years, and has said he has used it on every project since — work for Post Malone, Charlie Puth, Lizzo and Camila Cabello among them. Tony Maserati and Eduardo del Aguila run them too. The company's SWITCH module was a TEC Award finalist in 2026.

That matters because this is a category with exactly one obvious failure mode — putting something transparent-sounding in the path of everything you record. Engineers at that level do not install a routing box across their entire room unless they have satisfied themselves it is inaudible.

What Flock Audio Specialises In

One idea, executed narrowly: digitally controlled analogue routing.

The distinction in that phrase is the whole product, so it is worth being precise. The audio never becomes digital. There is no analogue-to-digital converter and no digital-to-analogue converter anywhere in a PATCH. Your microphone preamp's output arrives as analogue voltage and leaves as analogue voltage. What is digital is the control — the instruction telling the unit which input to connect to which output.

Sound On Sound describes the hardware as a crosspoint-switched analogue routing matrix, which is the accurate term. Picture a grid: every input is a row, every output is a column, and at each intersection there is a switch that can be open or closed. Close the switch where input 7 crosses output 12 and those two are connected, exactly as if you had pushed a patch cable between them. The software decides which switches close.

Because there is no conversion, there is no conversion latency to discuss — the signal propagates through the switching circuitry at the speed of electricity, and the only thing the design has to get right is transparency. Flock publish a noise floor of −93dBu A-weighted, a dynamic range of 127dB and THD of 0.0015% for the PATCH VT. Sound On Sound's reviewer, working at higher than normal monitoring levels, reported being "unable to detect any noise in, or any other effect on, the audio passing through" across a four-unit chain.

Three things a PATCH is not, because the category confuses people and getting this wrong wastes a customer's money:

• It is not an audio interface. It has no converters and no connection to your DAW's audio engine. You still need your interface.
• It is not a mixer. It routes signals; it does not sum them, set their level or process them.
• It is not a digital patchbay in the Dante or MADI sense. Those carry audio as network data. This carries audio as analogue voltage and carries only the routing instructions over USB.

If you have ever wanted your outboard rack to behave the way your plugin folder behaves, that is the product in one sentence.

How the System Is Used

In practice there are three stages, and only the first one takes any real time.

Wiring it in, once. All the permanent connections live on the rear panel, on DB-25 / D-Sub connectors using the standard Tascam pinout — eight balanced channels per connector. Your preamp outputs, compressor ins and outs, EQ ins and outs, interface ins and outs and console sends all land here on multicore looms. This is a proper installation job and the one genuinely laborious part of ownership. Budget for it.

Front-panel access for things that come and go. The units carry combo TRS/XLR inputs and XLR outputs on the front for a microphone, a guitar, or a piece of gear a client has brought in for the afternoon. The PATCH, VT and XT each have two of each; the LT has one. On the models that offer it, 48V phantom power is assignable per channel from the software, which means a condenser can be fed without a preamp in front of it and without anyone reaching behind a rack.

Everything after that happens in software. The free PATCH APP runs on macOS and Windows and connects over USB 2.0. You name each port once — "1176 In", "LA-2A Out", "Neve 543" — and from then on you build signal chains by dragging blocks into order. Routing a vocal through a preamp, into a compressor, into an EQ and out to the interface is four drags. Reordering the compressor and the EQ is one more.

Multing is where the software pulls decisively ahead of hardware. Sending one source to several destinations on a physical bay means a mult cable or a mult row, and splitting an analogue output across multiple inputs loads it down — impedance problems that can measurably change the sound. On a PATCH, a mult is a click, and Sound On Sound note it is "completely devoid of the impedance issues that can arise in a physical patchbay."

Then you save the routing with a name. That is the part that changes how a studio runs.

Same signal path, same analogue audio. The difference is whether it can be recalled.

The Range, and What Actually Separates the Models

Seven products, and the naming is more logical than it first appears. Flock count points, meaning total channels, so a 64-point unit is 32 inputs and 32 outputs, not 64 of each.

PATCH SE is the newest and the entry point, announced at NAMM 2026 as the start of a separate Standard Edition line. It gives you a 24-in by 24-out matrix in a cost-reduced design: fanless, PCB-mounted connectors, a simpler external power supply, and no phantom power, it is a +4dBu line-level router. If your outboard is all line level and you have preamps elsewhere, nothing is missing. If you want microphone inputs, you add a CX.

PATCH LT is 16 in by 16 out in a single rack unit, with 16 channels of assignable phantom power. This is the small-studio and mastering-rig size.

PATCH is the original and still the company's best seller with 32 in by 32 out, 1U, with 32 channels of phantom power. For most project studios with a full rack of outboard, this is the model the rest of the range is measured against.

PATCH VT steps up to 64 in by 64 out in 3U, with 32 channels of phantom power and sixteen D-Sub connectors on the back.

PATCH XT is the flagship: 96 in by 96 out, 192 points, 3U, built as a companion to a large-format console. It adds an optional CAT5 Ethernet connection for network control alongside USB.

All of them run the same routing engine, and up to ten units can be linked into one system under a single software instance, so the range is a ladder rather than a set of dead ends.

Two modules sit alongside the patchbays. The CX is an eight-channel microphone and instrument module with combo inputs on the front, D-Sub out to a PATCH, per-channel phantom power, and up to 60dB of gain, so it works as a genuine preamp bank as well as a level converter. It is how you give a phantom-less PATCH SE a tracking front end. And SWITCH, the TEC-nominated newcomer, is a desktop box that toggles eight mono or stereo inputs to a pair of XLR outputs over USB-C, a monitor or source selector rather than a matrix, controlled by a knob with its own screen.

Software comes in two tiers. PATCH APP is free for life with any unit, on macOS and Windows. PATCH APP DX is the paid tier, available on subscription or as a perpetual licence, and it adds a hardware management section that stores photographs and notes about your rack inside the routing file, colour coding, folder and tag organisation, a Quick Strip for six frequently used routings, and synchronised control across Mac, iPhone and iPad. DX is macOS and iOS only.

What This Looks Like in a Real Session

Tracking. You save a routing per source. "Vocal chain", "DI bass", "Drum room pair". Setting up for the next overdub is selecting a preset rather than re-patching, which means the artist keeps their momentum while you change the entire front end.

Shootouts. Three preamps on one source, switched instantly and repeatably, with the singer performing once. Comparing hardware properly has always been hard because the comparison itself takes long enough for your ears to forget. Removing the delay is genuinely useful.

Parallel processing. Multing a source into a clean path and a heavily compressed path, then blending them at the desk or in the box, is one click instead of a mult cable and an impedance compromise.

Mixing. Chain order stops being a commitment. Compressor before EQ or EQ before compressor is a drag rather than a decision, and you find out which one the track wants by hearing both.

Revisions — the one that pays for it. A client comes back six weeks later wanting the vocal a little less bright. You open the session, recall the routing, and the analogue chain that made the approved mix is standing again exactly as it was. No photograph, no notebook, no rebuilding from memory.

Mastering. Small channel counts, an absolute transparency requirement, and the need to document exactly what was in the path for a given master. This is arguably the best-fit application in the whole list.

Where the Workflow Gain Really Comes From

Everything above is convenience. The thing that changes a business is recall, and Flock's answer to it is DX Bridge — a plugin in VST, AU and AAX formats, included with PATCH APP DX, that you insert on a track in your DAW project.

With it in place, the routing state is stored with the DAW session. Open the session and the analogue configuration comes back with it, instead of being reconstructed by hand.

That is the moment the gap described at the top of this article closes. Your outboard rack becomes as recallable as your plugin chain. For a commercial room turning sessions around for multiple clients, the value is not really the time saved on any single recall — it is that revisions stop being a risk. You are no longer relying on somebody's memory of what the signal path was.

It is worth being clear about the boundary: this recalls routing, not knob positions. If you turned the ratio down on the 1176, the PATCH will put the 1176 back in the chain but it will not put the ratio back. Total analogue recall still needs either gear with its own recall, or notes. What Flock solve is the half of the problem that was never solvable before.

The Part That Only Matters Here

Three things make this land differently in Malaysia than it does in Los Angeles.

Humidity is not kind to mechanical contacts. Oxidation is an electrochemical process and moisture accelerates it, which is why anyone maintaining a patchbay in this climate ends up on first-name terms with contact cleaner. A system where the switching happens inside a sealed chassis rather than across a few hundred exposed jack contacts removes a maintenance job, not just an inconvenience. It also removes the most common source of the intermittent crackle that costs you a take.

Space is expensive. A studio built into a shoplot unit in PJ or a converted room in a condo does not have a wall to give to a patchbay and its cable nest. Replacing several rack units of sockets with one or three is a real gain when every unit of rack space is contested.

Shared and rental rooms change hands daily. A room used by several engineers, or rented by the session, is exactly where "who repatched this and why" becomes a recurring argument. Named, saved routings per engineer, recalled in a second, is a straightforwardly better way to run a room that more than one person uses.

Who This Is For — and Who It Is Not

And the limitations, stated plainly:

• It routes analogue audio only. No MIDI, no digital audio formats. Anything on AES, ADAT, Dante or MADI is outside its scope and still needs its own routing.
• It expects line level. The matrix is designed around +4dBu. Low-output sources need preamplification in front of it — which is what the CX module is for, and a cost to plan for rather than discover.
• The installation is real work. DB-25 looms, a wiring plan, and an afternoon at minimum. This is not a device you unbox and use before lunch.
• The larger units generate heat. Sound On Sound's main criticism of the PATCH VT was that its fan could be audible in a small, quiet room. If your control room is also your live room, ask about placement before you buy.
• The premium software is Apple-only. PATCH APP DX, and therefore DX Bridge and DAW-session recall, do not run on Windows. Windows users get the free PATCH APP, which does the routing and stores presets but not the session integration. For a Windows-based studio, that removes the single strongest argument for the system, and you should weigh the decision knowing it.
• And it is a significant investment at every point in the range. This is professional infrastructure, priced accordingly. The case for it is made by how much hardware it is managing and how much revision work you do — not by the spec sheet.

Music Bliss pro audio · Team Onyx

Talk to Our Pro Audio Team

Whether a digitally controlled patchbay makes sense for your room is not a question a spec sheet can answer. It depends on how much outboard you own, whether you work in a hybrid or in-the-box, how much revision work comes back to you, how your room is used and by how many people, and — genuinely — whether you are on Mac or Windows.

That is a conversation. Come in and talk it through with our pro audio team, or message us with your channel count, your outboard list and how your room is wired now, and we will work out whether a PATCH belongs in it, which point count you actually need, and what the installation involves — including the honest answer when the money is better spent on another compressor first.

Through Team Onyx, our professional audio division, we handle consultation, design, delivery and installation for studios as well as venues. By Musicians, For Musicians.

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