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Why am I hearing noise when a single device is connected to my patchbay?

Most patchbays from other manufacturers perform the same way and exhibit this.  An analogy would be a guitar amp,  with just the one side being plugged in,  the wire becomes an aerial due to it not being terminated.  This seems to be standard due to the way TRS patchbays do their normalling,  by meaning a breaking ground connection.

We measured the noise floor raise (it seems to be different depending on the gear and how it grounds its audio connections) and it’s about  +20db of noise in the most affected piece of gear we could find.  With the aes white paper accepting that -60 db (which we believe to be weirdly high) as the standard maximum noise floor of recording equipment, we could not find a single piece of gear on hand that passed that threshold.

Most importantly, remember that you are measuring the raised noise floor of gear when nothing is plugged into them and therefore not in use. This means unless you are monitoring idle equipment for some reason, it shouldn’t affect anything in the slightest.