Jez,

"Traditionaly when you are designing stuff you draw your ideas out on the back of a fag packet,or if you are in the pub a beer mat.The airoplane,television,fusion reactor where all designed like that, and it is the natural order of things."

A friend of mine and I were at the bar last week. He's a fellow live sound mixer, and the sound co. he works for does a lot of theatrical productions. There's usually a couple dozen wireless mics involved.

One of the problems they have is determining where faults lie, so it's common for the monitor mixer to plug headphones into each wireless receiver's monitor jack to hear if the mic is working.

Anyways, he described the kind of switching system he'd like: one rack space, jacks on the back, headphone out w/volume on the front, and 24 buttons-n-lights on the front to select the active channel.

I sketched it out on a napkin, based it on a Cygnal part (I love ISP). Had to borrow a pen from the bartender, who was very amused by the whole thing. Napkin went through the wash, tho'.

--a