Mercury 3 vs Muse Wonder

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.

Patchbay is a small workshop in Rotterdam where three of us spend our days bringing vintage synthesizers back to life. We repair and restore instruments from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s — Minimoogs with drifting oscillators, Junos with silent choruses, Prophet-5s that have not powered on in decades — tracing faults board by board, replacing tired components, and calibrating each machine until it sounds musical again. We believe these instruments were built to be played, not preserved behind glass, so we work carefully and reversibly wherever possible, documenting every repair and keeping original parts when they can be saved. Musicians, studios, and collectors bring us synths from across Europe, sometimes in flight cases, sometimes in pieces. Whether it needs a full restoration or a single sticky key, we treat it as if it were our own, and we will not send it home until we would happily play it ourselves.