Analogue mixers

[steevio]

This guy explains his opinion on analogue summing:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun04/a ... 0604-5.htm
He also has something to say about overdriving mixers at the end.

BTW, my ZEDR16 arrived today. Will keep you posted.

i used to be subscribed to Sound on Sound (for 10 years) but i cancelled my subscription about 5 years ago because i believed that they were blatantly pro-digital and were giving great reviews to equipment (both digital and analogue) that were inferior products in real life.
i used to use them as a industry standard reference and i bought many different bits of kit which were given 5 star reviews in SoS which are now gathering dust in corners of my studio.

if you look at the date of that review its 2004, alot has changed since then, there is alot more new analogue kit on the market than there was back then, everyone was riding the digital wave back then, now there are more people realising the power of certain analogue processes.

he states that the film industry would be using analogue desks if they were better, which is blatant nonsense, digital editing has transformed the film industry, because it is perfectly suited to the process, there is no comparison between the film industry and a minimal musician wanting warm tones on his sounds.

manufacturers would not be producing these analogue/digital hybrid devices if there was not a huge market for them, saying old myths are hard to shift, is patronising to the thousands of musicians who use their ears and know what they prefer.

rant over

ps have fun with the Zed !!!!

edit, sorry guys, what a twat i am, having an extremely stressful time, but no need to take it out on you guys.
from a balanced viewpoint, SOS have published some ace articles over the years, ive learned a lot from SOS, just went off it a few years back thats all,

[hydrogen]

Steevio, i get where you are coming from BUT there have been significant improvements in the digital workflow just within the last couple years. Average CPU speed has almost doubled and there are huge amounts of things you can do in the box. Nebula is one of these things... and it will blow your mind if you try some of the encodings. The thing about analogue you would need to spend quite a bit of money to have great sound. Spending $600 on a mixer will only bring you some interesting results, not mindblowing OMG this was produced in a $100,000 studio. Where as you can accomplish very close to this with significantly less money by using a fast CPU and Nebula, Slate VCC, Satson. It may be difference to some more analogue workflows BUT you can still have $100,000 sound.

Also, DSP units are extremely powerful these days, some even running at 96khz 24bit are pretty powerful, like the Strymon pedals... they really do sound amazing and are totally interactive.

I think once inexpensive digital throughput can handle 96khz+32bit x 100 channels of audio with 0 latency. You will have a much different opinion.

[steevio]

Steevio, i get where you are coming from BUT there have been significant improvements in the digital workflow just within the last couple years. Average CPU speed has almost doubled and there are huge amounts of things you can do in the box. Nebula is one of these things... and it will blow your mind if you try some of the encodings. The thing about analogue you would need to spend quite a bit of money to have great sound. Spending $600 on a mixer will only bring you some interesting results, not mindblowing OMG this was produced in a $100,000 studio. Where as you can accomplish very close to this with significantly less money by using a fast CPU and Nebula, Slate VCC, Satson. It may be difference to some more analogue workflows BUT you can still have $100,000 sound.

Also, DSP units are extremely powerful these days, some even running at 96khz 24bit are pretty powerful, like the Strymon pedals... they really do sound amazing and are totally interactive.

I think once inexpensive digital throughput can handle 96khz+32bit x 100 channels of audio with 0 latency. You will have a much different opinion.

i'm open minded bro,

but i just cant handle the lack of controls.
in my studio there is a knob for absolutely every single job, i never have to think when i need an instant result, to have a digital set-up that would satisfy me, i would have to have a control surface the size of my modular and desk, that wouldnt come cheap.
i'm a menu / screen free guy now and loving every minute of it.

and more than anything i like electric circuits i can feel.

it totally suits the kind of music i'm making. pure improvisation from start to finish. no thinking.

all i'm doing here is saying i prefer analogue. i'm not doubting the strengths of digital.

[hydrogen]

word steevio! your workflow is definitely something else compared to what many people are doing. Its genius really...

I just wanted to point some stuff out in case people were starting to feel pinched for money or for music.... sometimes the lust for gear can get in the way of just getting in there with a laptop and a couple of free or inexpensive plugins, going at it and creating some amazing tunes. wow... probably a bit off topic now. sorry!

[steevio]

it's amazing what you can do now with computers, if i was starting out now, thats exactly where i would be.

[Barfunkel]

I think once inexpensive digital throughput can handle 96khz+32bit x 100 channels of audio with 0 latency. You will have a much different opinion.

But what if you only need 8 channels? I can't imagine a minimal track using a 100 tracks. People actually tell me that my stuff is too maximal and that I should streamline my tracks to be considered minimal, and I have 5-8 tracks.

Computers already are fast enough to make techno, I don't see how more powerful computers would change much. In pop music yes, they sometimes actually need 200 tracks and modern computers can't process that yet (I think).

Computers are also fast enough to, in theory, make realistic analog emulations, people just aren't good enough at programming them. Increased computer speed doesn't change that, it's the algorhithms that need work. They are VERY complex things to program and the it's not exactly a big business. Declined sales, piracy, mp3, loudness war etc mean that the companies doing the plugins don't have the time or the resources to really spend thousands and thousands of man hours to create these things. Most plugins are coded by some lonely bloke in his basement, not by a team of a hundred expert programmers, scientists and musicians. And as youtube and other compressed mediums become more and more common, there's no demand for convincing analogue emulations either. Who's gonna spend the effort on progamming, say, a perfect Minimoog plugin, when there's maybe a few hundred/thousand people in the world who're actually going to buy it, especially considering it's going to cost much more than a typical plugin due the man hours needed to make it.

What they should do is to design better UI's for computers. Maschine is a good step in the right direction, but we need moar! I can make a track in an hour with my HW, when using a computer we always spend hours just going through kick drum samples alone. Other people might actually like using a mouse and a screen for editing things but at least I hate it. It's slow and annoying. Then again, a proper UI would include hundreds of knobs and buttons and it would probably end up costing as much as it's hardware counterpart.

So, in my opinion, due to several factors computers are NOT going to replace my hardware, ever. Computers do become faster, but it's going to only increase the quantity of things you can do at the same time (which is already high enough for techno), not necessarily the quality of them. There's no demand for quality in today's average listening environment, so nobody is going to spend the big bucks on the development. Of course there are always SOME (but most of them are sworn analogue enthusiasists who won't be buying that plugin no matter how good it sounded) who care, but not enough to really turn the tide.

[hydrogen]

Barfunkel, ur comment about people being lonely bloke computer programmers is completely ignorant and void of fact. I'm sure you could spend hours optimizing them but the thing is certain algorithms simply take more cycles. I would love for you to send this to any plugin developer and get your ass handed back to you about all the math that is required to make a plugin process sound. It can be very CPU intensive to do some basic math and then when u throw on the non-linearity of analogue you've just compounded the whole problem significantly.

I work with engineers everyday and we talk about optimization for real time graphics engines. At a certain point there is just nothing you can do to save cycles, because there is actual numbers that need to get crunched per frame..

100 channels easy for even the most basic things. I like to use at least 10 channels for drums and 3 channels for bass, etc. when u are talking about sound it helps to do layering to build up a sound in stereo space. Or it allows you to process different parts in different ways to get best sound out of the material. The convenience of having channels at your disposal is great and doesn't require you to have to mixdown and flatten parts.

You can obviously make minimal without 100 channels of audio. But a 16 channel neve summing mixer will still run you 3 grand. And i'm saying U could buy a dope computer, some console plugins, neve nebula kernels and great soundcard for that price.

[lem]

But what if you only need 8 channels? I can't imagine a minimal track using a 100 tracks. People actually tell me that my stuff is too maximal and that I should streamline my tracks to be considered minimal, and I have 5-8 tracks.

Computers already are fast enough to make techno, I don't see how more powerful computers would change much. In pop music yes, they sometimes actually need 200 tracks and modern computers can't process that yet (I think).

I get what you are trying to say but track count is irrelavant to genre. You might be supprised how many tracks are used by some minimal producers, and how few are used in pop. Don't listen to these people that tell you how many tracks a minimal tune should have. Its just complete nonsense.

I personally bounce things quite a lot at early stages, because I know how I can mould it later on if I need too. This is how I get over the Kick drum searching that you mention. I just commit! I know I can give any kick track more thump, more weight, more click.
I do this to stop the searching for a sound that you will never find and to keep my trackcount down.

I'm pretty sure modern computers can do 200 tracks, I could be very wrong tho! (I don't keep up with or care about it tbh)