This could be done, but it might cause some signal degradation.

Using banana jacks on the wall to connect to amps in a rack was discussed recently and the answers and comments stopped coming when some brilliant person said "speaker wires should be connected directly to the amplifier. Anything else is just busy work." (James, actually I thought you were the one who wrote that.)

Going back to your question, why would there EVER be a speaker terminal patch panel? Because the center speaker will have to have the left channel signal for a few minutes, or your dining room left speaker will need to be connected to the patio right amp output for an hour or so? This change would be done using 14 gauge wire, with banana plugs, into a panel of banana jacks, moving from one jack to another?

There may be a bit of signal degradation. Just do the best thing: leave enough slack coming out of the wall to be able to connect directly to the amp(s).

I suppose part of your rack issue is that you might not be able to stand behind the rack and bring the wires right up to the amp terminals. If that's the case, you can do what pros used to do in situations like this: create a harness of nicely labeled wires with spade lugs on the end, with the wire lengths worked out so the harness feeds nicely to a set of barrier terminals.



The spade lugs go under 6-32 screws which are tightened securely. The terminals in the picture are (at least, used to be called) a Y barrier strip. It's built so there's a piece of metal that pokes through the bottom of the connector. This is for chassis-mounted strips. If you just had wire coming in from both sides, you'd use spade lugs on each side.