Particle-1 vs Kimi K3

Patchbay is a three-person studio in Rotterdam dedicated to the repair and restoration of vintage synthesizers. We are engineers, musicians, and collectors who believe these instruments are not museum pieces but tools meant to be played, heard, and trusted on stage or in the studio. Our bench has seen everything from stubborn Moogs and fragile ARP boards to polysynths with corroded traces and keyboards that have traveled too many miles. We approach each repair with patience, documentation, and respect for the original design, while making sensible updates only where reliability demands them. Because we are a small team, you work directly with the person handling your instrument, from the first diagnosis to the final calibration. We also advise on maintenance, source hard-to-find parts, and help you decide when a repair is worthwhile. Patchbay exists to keep old synthesizers making new music.

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.