It’s the size of a standard guitar pedal. It needs no power It’s… covered in jacks. It’s Mulch Box, the first hardware from Go Outside, and it’s a stunningly simple idea for signal routing any of your gear, minijack and full-sized jack alike.
In this torrent of digital stuff, it’s sort of refreshing to see this cute pink box that says “oops, all jacks.” Here’s the creator’s description:
A completely passive patch-bay and signal multiplier that lets you route, split, loop and combine any signal you can send through a TS cable. Combining 1/4″ jacks and 3.5mm jacks it can be used with instruments, synths, pedals, modular/eurorack, tape machines, and everything in between for sonic experimentation.
And it comes with this friendly video and some pleasing examples.
This is all about sound, but analog video gear using this kind of cable would also work, I suppose.
These are being made in small batches — $175.00 a piece. On the other hand, if seeing this inspires people to think of some other patch boxes and all-jack concoctions of your own, too, I’d say my mission is accomplished! It’s kind of remarkable to me that we haven’t had more concepts like this, particularly as folks amass random bits of gear and then spend valuable creative time wondering how to patch it together and where that one minijack cable went. (Okay, some problems we can’t solve for you. Clean that cable drawer! Go to Radio Sha– okay, not that anymore, but you get the idea.)
I love this, though, and I might well dump some gear and get this instead. Also, welcome back to the newly PHP-patched CDM, and if you have a website that relies on PHP in some way and don’t know what I’m talking about, better — look that up.
That’s it; that’s the story. But now you can hopefully load this page on that fresh PHP and I can call it a day.