Tascam PB-64
A bare metal box with sixty-four RCA sockets and no normaling - the patch bay that made you do the wiring yourself.
Overview
The PB-64 is about as unglamorous as studio gear gets. It's a metal box with a 4×16 array of phono (RCA) sockets mounted on either side. Tape or mixer inputs and outputs plug into the back, and double-ended jumpers interconnect them on the front panel. That's the whole idea. Most patch bays of the period shipped with normaling, meaning internal connections that let a signal flow from the top row of jacks to the bottom row until you insert a patch cord. The PB-64 doesn't normalize anything. Every connection is made by hand, with a jumper, every time.
For some engineers that's a dealbreaker. For others it's the point. A non-normaled bay connects the front-panel jack directly to the rear-panel jack, like a double-female coupling, so the PB-64 puts nothing in your signal path that you didn't put there yourself. If you want to reroute, you reroute. If you want a straight-through connection, you patch it. Electronic Musician (undated excerpt, p.1) described the PB-64 as consisting of 64 RCA connectors that are not normaled but connect directly to the rear panel, and listed it at $120. An earlier $145 quote from the same publication's patch-bay roundup sits alongside that figure. The gap likely reflects the difference between list and street pricing, or simply the time between issues.
Tascam's promotional bundles show how it positioned the PB-64. Throughout early 1980 and again in early 1981, Tascam ran a limited-time offer: buy an 80-8 recorder and a Model-5B mixer between January 1 and April 30 and receive the Model-1 monitor mixer, the MB-20 meter bridge, and the PB-64 patch bay as part of the package. The offer appeared in Modern Recording (February 1980, p.37) and again in Sound Arts (March 1980, p.25), and was repeated the following year in Modern Recording (January 1981, p.15). The PB-64 was a sweetener, a $120-ish accessory thrown in to close a multi-thousand-dollar system sale.
In use, the PB-64 demands discipline. Because nothing is normaled, every session starts with a patch plan. Jumper cables live on the front panel, and the front-panel sockets are the working surface - you reach over the box and move a jumper to change a routing. The upside is total flexibility with zero switching contacts in the path. The downside is that a PB-64 without a labeling scheme is a nightmare, and the box has no built-in provision for marking what's plugged in where.
The PB-64's second life is as a general-purpose passive patch bay for anyone working with unbalanced RCA gear, and it fills that role without modification. There's no normaling circuitry to defeat and no active components to fail, so a PB-64 that passes signal on all 64 points is a PB-64 that works. That simplicity is why they still turn up. A 1983 classified in Modern Recording (July 1983, p.66) listed a "TEAC PB64 Patch Bay" at $60 used, roughly half its original price. Buyers are mostly people who need a lot of RCA patch points cheaply, not collectors chasing a grail.
The PB-64 is a tool, not an artifact. It does one thing, 64 non-normaled RCA connections in a metal box, and does it without pretense. For a Tascam Series rig or any unbalanced RCA-based setup, it's enough. If you want normaling, half-normaling, or any other convenience, look elsewhere in the Tascam line. The PB-32 series offered normaled pairs in several jack configurations, and the PB-64 was the odd one out because it refused to normalize.
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