leigh
Well-known member
A preamble: I've read a million words, pro and con, about "summing mixers". I've mixed in Pro Tools, I've mixed on boards. The conclusion I've reached with summing mixers is that the summing itself isn't worth it. If it helps your workflow, making it easy to insert outboard compressors, great. If it means that you use a phat toob pre to add magic sonic goo at the makeup gain stage, great. If you pleasantly clip transients with a HEDD during the A-to-D re-conversion step, then that's swell too. But the "summing at unity" itself ain't doing much in the way of mojo.
Now, I don't really care about defending the above points. It's the conclusion I've come to, but I'm not trying to press it on anyone else. Just a preamble to understand where my next thoughts are coming from...
One of the advantages of a traditional mixing console over a unity summing buss is being able to pass audio out of your DAW at full resolution (bitwise). If you're mixing on a console, you can just leave your DAW's channel faders at unity, and a "full-strength" signal gets passed out of your D/A converters. All the attenuation occurs in the analog domain. One the disadvantages of an trad console, of course, is the effort it takes to recall faders manually, or deal with the expense of automated faders.
So... here's the idea: create a summing mixer where the stereo pairs of inputs each have a different attenuation. Start at "0dB", then the next pair is at -3dB, then at -6dB, and so on. (Depending on how many channels the mixer has, of course, those steps could be larger or smaller.) Then, in the box, you could label your various converter outputs to correspond to the summing mixer's inputs. The whole idea is that, instead of using your DAW faders to attenuate signals, you are still attenuating in the analog domain, like on a traditional console. Or, at least, your DAW faders only have to attenuate 3dB at most. And, the setup is totally recallable.
I'm not proposing that running DAW faders at anything but 0dB sounds like shite. That *is* a school of thought, and it may have merit. However, that's not what drives this whole idea. Rather, the idea is to be able to run your D/A converters at near-maximum, to maintain full signal resolution.
And therein, of course, lies the question of whether this would all be worth it. Is the phenomenon of changing resolution (again, number of active bits) when you change gain part of what sucks about digital mixing? Or does it not matter if the delivery format is digital, since a reverb tail at -36dB will still only end up using 10 out of 16 bits on a CD?
Please, let's hear it. I would love some feedback on this.
cheers,
Leigh
Now, I don't really care about defending the above points. It's the conclusion I've come to, but I'm not trying to press it on anyone else. Just a preamble to understand where my next thoughts are coming from...
One of the advantages of a traditional mixing console over a unity summing buss is being able to pass audio out of your DAW at full resolution (bitwise). If you're mixing on a console, you can just leave your DAW's channel faders at unity, and a "full-strength" signal gets passed out of your D/A converters. All the attenuation occurs in the analog domain. One the disadvantages of an trad console, of course, is the effort it takes to recall faders manually, or deal with the expense of automated faders.
So... here's the idea: create a summing mixer where the stereo pairs of inputs each have a different attenuation. Start at "0dB", then the next pair is at -3dB, then at -6dB, and so on. (Depending on how many channels the mixer has, of course, those steps could be larger or smaller.) Then, in the box, you could label your various converter outputs to correspond to the summing mixer's inputs. The whole idea is that, instead of using your DAW faders to attenuate signals, you are still attenuating in the analog domain, like on a traditional console. Or, at least, your DAW faders only have to attenuate 3dB at most. And, the setup is totally recallable.
I'm not proposing that running DAW faders at anything but 0dB sounds like shite. That *is* a school of thought, and it may have merit. However, that's not what drives this whole idea. Rather, the idea is to be able to run your D/A converters at near-maximum, to maintain full signal resolution.
And therein, of course, lies the question of whether this would all be worth it. Is the phenomenon of changing resolution (again, number of active bits) when you change gain part of what sucks about digital mixing? Or does it not matter if the delivery format is digital, since a reverb tail at -36dB will still only end up using 10 out of 16 bits on a CD?
Please, let's hear it. I would love some feedback on this.
cheers,
Leigh