After the dilemma

Happy Friday!

I figured this week's topic would spawn some interesting discussion. There have been a number of folks on either side of the equation emailing me with possible solutions.

Additional notes -

• It was pointed out that a modern digital summing bus has the capacity for 1500dB of dynamic range. I'm on the hunt to find out how that impacts track count, stay tuned.

• I like mixing in the box for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are repeatability, ease of revision, and the ability to archive ALL of my work. There are some very cool plug-ins in my virtual rack, and I'm generally pretty happy with the palette of tonal colors available. Making hi-res and lo-res copies is pretty simple, and versioning is easy-breezy.

• Mixing on a console has its own attraction; I get to use all of the cool outboard gear that has been accumulating in my physical rack over the years. There's something about grabbing a handful of faders or EQ knobs and just mixing by feel that is very satisfying. Not that you can't do that with a control surface, it just takes a half-hour to set it up. Plus, I have metering when and where I want it, and the ability to trim down the input to each channel to avoid the aforementioned bus overload.

Here's the interesting discovery in this experiment: working in a hybrid mixing world (DAW as an editor and playback medium, final mix through a console) gives me the best of all possible options as mentioned above, plus the ability to quickly compare the sound of a mix-in-the-box session with the analog version simply by routing channels to multiple outs in Pro Tools. Try it, you'll like it!

Next up - either Logic automation or data archival, I haven't decided yet.

Cheers,

MBM