The solution to yesterday's dilemma came forth during dinner at AES in San Francisco with a renowned LA studio owner/engineer (whom I shall refer to as AS). We were discussing Pro Tools and the various controllers available for same, which evolved into the subject of mixing in the box. AS related that he had not had great luck doing it, and that he split out all his tracks into a vintage Neve console for mixing. Makes sense - I know a lot of folks who break out their mixes, but, sonically speaking, is there really a difference? He claimed that even if you route all your tracks out of an 8 channel Pro Tools I/O and run it into a little Mackie mixer it will sound better. Unbelievable! But he insisted it was true, and challenged me to try it next time I had a "problem" mix. This was the ideal opportunity to test his theory.
OK, I got rid of all the Pro Tools auxes, submasters, and the master bus, and routed all of my tracks to the 8 outs of a single HD192 so that I had stereo drums, stereo GTRs, stereo keys, mono bass, mono Vox, and ran them into a Tascam M3700 analog console. Voila! Lo and behold, the drums suddenly came alive; the vocals were clear and had dynamics, even the murky bass track had definition.
What was the deal? Why did the relatively pedestrian Tascam console yield a better sounding mix than the fully blown Pro Tools rig with all of the expensive plug-ins? Give up? Check back tomorrow and I'll relate the rest of the story. It's scary! And it'll scare all the Nuendo, Logic, DP, etc. users, too.
Happy Halloween!
MBM
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3 comments:
ok..spill the beans. Time for Part 3 :)
Yep Yep, This is why the scene has been flooded with small format consoles and mix-bus rack units...(Dangerous, Neve, etc...) Part of the problem is the load on the DSP/card architecture (nothing new), and part the audio interface. I think that the digidesign interfaces are lacking somewhat, and that if you were to A/B with Apogee or Prisim converters, there would be quite a contrast. (Note, Apogee now makes HD AMBUS cards for their AD8000, How's that for legacy support?:)
It will be interesting to see if there's a resurgence in analog console sales. You can buy a 15 year-old Neve or SSL for comparatively little dough these days.
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