Nex-N2.6 vs Claude Opus 5.5

Patchbay is a three-person studio in Rotterdam dedicated to the repair and restoration of vintage synthesizers. The name comes from the heart of every modular system: the point where all the signals meet. We work on the machines that shaped the sound of the last fifty years—Junos, Prophets, Minimoogs, and the strange, wonderful instruments that never made it into the history books.

Our workshop is a place of solder smoke and oscilloscope traces, where dead oscillators are coaxed back to life and tired potentiometers are quietly replaced with period-correct parts. We believe these instruments deserve to stay alive: not as museum pieces, but as working tools for the musicians, producers, and studios who play them every day. Between the three of us, we bring decades of experience in electronics and restoration, and a stubborn refusal to let good machines go to waste.

Patchbay is three people in a narrow workshop near the Maas in Rotterdam. Every day we open up instruments that were built before most of their current owners were born. Some arrive in flight cases and some come wrapped in old bath towels. Most have a story: a Juno that went quiet halfway through a gig, a Minimoog left in someone's attic for thirty years, or a modular system that a previous technician gave up on.

We started Patchbay because we kept seeing good synthesizers sent off as "unrepairable" when all they needed was patience, a schematic and a steady hand. We swap out dried capacitors, hunt for intermittent faults, recalibrate oscillators until they track properly again, and source or rebuild parts that stopped being made decades ago.

We don't try to make old machines sound new. Our job is to make them sound like themselves again, and to make sure they keep working for the next person who plays them.