9710 triple vca, banana plugs?

[marcelds]

Just picked up the kit for the 9710 Triple VCA. I normally build with banana jacks. Mentioned it to a friend (banana user too) and he said he tried building it a while ago and had some trouble finding workarounds for the normalized jacks which are usually switching 1/8". I totally forgot about that and kind of regret getting the 9710 now.
Then a co-worker showed me his multimeter, which has switching banana jacks, which i had never seen before. The relevant jacks, based on the multimeter's function, are illuminated until a plug is inside, which turns off the light. Now, these look fairly easy to assemble - a switch glued to the bottom of the jack would do the trick - but still seems like a pain to install.
Any ideas? Has anyone heard of doing such a thing? What are other options as far as using non-phono jacks for normalized functions?
Best,
M

[royg]

(a year later)

I've built the Paia 9700 rack with banana. I did the normalling by drilling a 2mm hole across the banana socket such that a plug would obscure it. Then I positioned an infra-red LED and a phototransistor on either side, driving a relay. You can feel the click of the relay, giving it some tactile feedback.

It was supremely time-consuming, taking at least as long for 20 normalled sockets as it took to make the rest of it. I would try hard to avoid doing it again, but it was an interesting engineering exercise.

Roy Gwinn