Abbey Road’s Studio Three, which has been home to artists such as Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Lady Gaga, Frank Ocean, Florence + The Machine, Brockhampton and Amy Winehouse, has installed 21 Van Damme Purple Patches as part of an extensive revamp.

Purple Patch is a PPE56 2×48 bantam patchbay, created as part of a two-year research and development programme to ensure that recording studios, theatres with recording facilities and broadcasting houses get the best in terms of performance, functionality and capability.

Simon Campbell, Head of Technical Services at Abbey Road Studios said: “You can tell that the team at VDC have done their research and worked very hard on creating a great product. We received 21 units straight off the production line, configured them and really put Purple Patch through its paces before we signed them off.  We identified a few things that needed to be tweaked – and VDC made sure everything was done to ensure a smooth installation.”

The PPE56 Purple Patch is both designed and manufactured in the UK and incorporates features that cater carefully for modern day needs, including:

• Fully programmable normalling options inclusive of full-normalling, half-normalling, parallel and no normalling settings, which are adjustable whilst the patch remains terminated.
• Individual earthing selection for all patch points, allowing for phantom power and unbalanced signal pass through to be selected point by point.
• No compromise steel chassis and aircraft-grade aluminium construction.
• Individual 110 Ohm impedance jack modules secured to the chassis behind a fully removable front panel which allows access to all jack screws for future retightening whilst the bay remains fully in place.
• Laser-etched full colour front panel custom engraving or traditional ‘scribble strip’ design front panel options available
• 6x EDAC 56 rear connectors configured to industry standard pin-outs.

Niall Holden, CEO of VDC commented: “With Purple Patch, we wanted to create a world class product.  Studio Three at Abbey Road was the first ever location that installed these particular patchbays and it was a baptism of fire.  We worked together to make sure that we really nailed the product and got the quality down to a fine art.  Everything had to work perfectly – and function in a way that you’d expect.

“We’d become so frustrated with the failure rates of the alternatives on the market and decided to spend time refining and improving what was already out there.  The main aim was to come up with an offering that was more reliable and versatile than the others, so that world class studios – like Abbey Road – don’t have to deal with sub-standard products, because they simply don’t have the time to do so.”

Purple Patch is available now through distributors – click here to find your nearest one.