Particle-1 vs Mercury 3

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 three-person repair studio in Rotterdam, tucked between a bike shop and a coffee roastery, where vintage synthesizers come to live another life. We are not a factory and we are not a museum; we are technicians who love the smell of warm solder and the patience that old circuits demand. Between us we have restored everything from early Moog modulars to battered Junos, and we treat each instrument as if it were the first one we ever opened. There is no assembly line here. Every capacitor is tested, every busbar tracked by hand, and every voice board is listened to twice—once on the bench, once through the speakers of the synth that will use it. Patchbay exists because these machines deserve more than a quick fix. They deserve someone who knows their quirks, their failures, and the strange, beautiful sounds that made us fall in love with them in the first place.