[poncival]

Hosa Technologies just came out with a physical lightpipe patchbay that might do the trick. I was trying to build one of these last year and it took me weeks to find a lightpipe/optical SPDIF female-female "gender bender" and they were $5 each, I mounted them in a rack panel and used them to change optical patches without having to go around behind my rack. This worked fine as long as the total optical runs were less than about 40 feet, then I started getting some glitches. I swear Hosa read my mind- their patchbay with 24 ins and outs probably costs 1/10th of what my 8x8 patchbay cost me! Hope this helps.