Nex-N2.6 vs Mercury 3

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 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.