Ben Bradley wrote:

On Thu, 06 May 2004 13:40:48 -0400, agent86
wrote:

I'm inclined to agree with you're point of view, Arny. But even if you
buy the argument about digital resolution vs decreasing gain, these boxes
don't
even address that. All the gain adjustments STILL happen in the DAW. An
analog summing bus without faders or pot is NOT an analog mixer AFAIK.

Ironically, changing the gain in 'digital' is a multiplication
function, and that increases the word length and requires dither to go
back to the original word length, and all that.
Summation (the calculation replaced by this box of resistors) is
literally adding numbers in a processor, and as long as you keep up
with overflows (which may require double precision integers, but
that's not a lot of overhead), the result is always 'exact'.

I suppose the reason these things are made is because people can
hear the difference, and many people like what comes out of the
resistor box better than what comes out of a digitally summed bus. I
hesistate to even post in this thread, because I don't think I can
hear the difference myself, and that seems to be the big criterion
here on RAP.


You can hear a difference in most anything if you pay attention. That's
why we get all the discussions about audio-phool cables & such. But
hearing a difference doesn't mean you can objectively say one is BETTER
than another.

I usually mix in analog, just because an analog mixer FEELS more natural to
me than a mouse (or even a digital mixer. I already know without thinking
about it, what all the knobs & faders & pushbuttons do, & I don't have to
spend a lot of time thinking about it. Granted, most of the stuff I'm
doing is acoustin & I seldom run more than 8 tracks & not a lot of effects.
On the rare occasion that I have enough going on that I think automation
would be handy, I do it in the computer. If I ever bothered to do an
analog & a digital mix of the exact same program material & do one of
Arny's ABX tests on it I suspect I would hear a difference. But I doubt it
would be enough of a difference for me to worry about. Life's just too
short to obsess about that kind of ****. It's going to end up on a 44.1/16
CD anyway. And it's probably going to get played back on some piece of
crap Sony all-in-one through Bose speakers.

I'm no Scott Dorsey, but I'm pretty sure my mixing room & monitor setup is
WAY more accurate than ANYthing my listeners are playing my stuff back on.
If it sound good in my mix room & it also sounds good in my living room,
then kife's too short to worry about whether it might sound a tiny little
bit better if I used a different summing bus. The only thing left to do is
see how it sounds in the car, & that's a good enough excuse to grab the ol'
fly rod & head for the nearest trout stream.