During the Northbound Pavilion build, we spent most late nights routing and re-routing a 70-speaker array through an actual patch bay rather than a software matrix, and it wasn’t nostalgia — it was speed.
When you’re standing in the space, listening to how a signal actually sits in the room, being able to physically re-patch in two seconds instead of tabbing through software menus changes how many iterations you can run in an evening. We still spec digital routing for the final locked show, but the physical bay is where the show gets designed.