MOTM

Does anyone have plans for a small bi-directional direct box. I'm 
building a modular system to do processing with, mostly, and I'm really 
scared of unwanted noise (I hate it, clients hate it, we all hate it, 
if I want noise I'll patch it in, or hire a cabbie to sit outside the 
studio and chat with his dispatcher). I'm sure we all have the problem 
of coming out of our patchbays and into filters, envelope followers, 
whatever and then returning our output back to our mixer. There has got 
to be a simple fix for this. All I've seen is a DL connectorized piece 
of glorious overkill by Purple Audio (the 1176 cloners). I'm imagining 
something much simpler. Terminate one end at a patch row, the other a 
bank of jacks, 6-8 of them, unbalanced goes in or out at the synth, 
patchrows are balanced, maybe 2U wide. How have y'all addressed this 
problem?