Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Kimi K3

Patchbay is three people in a workshop in Rotterdam, trying to keep old synthesizers alive. We repair, restore and recalibrate the instruments that shaped electronic music: Moogs and Oberheims, Rolands and Sequential Circuits, the odd temperamental Soviet oddity that someone found in an attic.

Most of what lands on our benches has been silent for years. A crackling pot, a drifting oscillator, a power supply that gave up in 1994. Some come from working musicians who need their instrument back before the next tour. Others come from people who inherited a dusty box from a parent and want to hear what it sounds like.

We work slowly and by hand. We trace faults with a scope and a schematic, source or rebuild parts when originals are gone, and change as little as we can. Every synth leaves with a note describing exactly what we did, so the next person to open it knows where we have been.

Come by, bring your synth, and stay for coffee.

Patchbay is a small workshop in Rotterdam where old synthesizers come back to life. We are three people — a former recording engineer, a self-taught circuit obsessive, and a classically trained pianist who fell in love with broken machines — and between us we have spent decades coaxing sound out of equipment the rest of the world gave up on.

We started Patchbay because we kept meeting the same problem: beloved instruments sitting silent in attics and studio corners, written off as unfixable. A Juno with a dead voice chip. A Prophet that drifts out of tune. A Moog that hums when it shouldn't. To us, none of these are lost causes. They are instruments with history in them, and they deserve careful hands, original parts where possible, and honest work.

Every synth that leaves our bench is played, tested, and listened to — because that is what it was made for.