Summing Mixer - Do I need one? Which one?

 FWIW I didn't find DrBills message as a dubious sales pitch. I understand hes involved with LTL, and found the general info and perspective helpful. 

Same here. Started making records when open reels & console was the only option. Never fully bought into the early days of PT and kept my analog junk while everyone started selling theirs to buy more plugins.

Memory says the OG Dangerous 2 bus was the first real summing box on the market? I remember being up at Chris's studio in midtown and they, him and like 2 other people were building them in the tech room. The core idea, the entire launch point was being able to patch some analog outboard onto the backend, treating the DAW as a tape machine while not needing the footprint & expensive of a big desk.

ITB vs analog summing is as old a debate as anything else. Goes back the monolith era & stonehenge. Monkeys pounding on rocks. 

Its a really different way of working & adds a level of commitment... and honestly some extra hassle on recalls. Not like the old days of documenting a 56 channel desk... but its not an F1 pit stop where the whole project comes back in 2.7 seconds either. 

If its not obvious I'm decidedly in the analog camp... the "D" word barely gets mentioned around here. But sometimes I mix ITB too, depends on the project... deadlines... that sort of thing. I can make either one sound great or terrible. Its not the gear its how we hear.  

Now, please don’t twist what I was saying against Dr. Bill who has been nothing but kind to me and my family in recent years. He’s a gentleman and someone who speaks from his experience, and I can’t recall him intentionally running another person down up here.

Forgive me, if I read something into your text that wasn’t there, but I am responding to you what read like an unprovoked attack on him.

I'm not too sure about that but IME he's been a super friendly, extremely helpful standup dude. I trust his ears, skill and advice.. Although I've just had the stark realisation that we originally crossed paths via various forums in 2009? Yeesh.. Time fly's huh?

Haha! Thanks guys. I don't know if I invented master bus processing OR if I deserve a pass, but when I was putting CAPI vp26's and AML (1073's) mic pre's on my mix bus over 15 years ago and talking on the forums about it, it really was a novel concept that people couldn't quite wrap their minds around.  I mean....mic pre on the mix buss??  Come on.....

That evolved into me wanting something more dedicated to the task with an elegant work flow, and when we showed the first SB prototypes at AES in LA, no one had a clue what it was or what to call it.  Including us I think....heh heh. Well, kinda...  We ended up calling it a 2 channel console, which is essentially what it does - emulate a console.  A and N (and now S) because....well, that's what my mentor Ronnie Capone (Stax) told me to use.  ( Look up his discography.   ).  So after summing boxes and small console didn't work for me (I had a 120 input automated console at the time), I met Brad and the Silver Bullet was born.

I AM proud of it.  Most who own one seem proud of it.  I'll gladly put it up against any summing solution cause I've done the research and listening.  It will at least stand up to the test.  Might be better.    Up to the user to decide that.

Hey, I came on to this thread to give my opinion, and Jacob or John can tell me to beat it.  One thing I normally say that I should have mentioned is that : I'M BIASED.  Heh heh.  sirthought - if I have offended you or overstepped, I'm truly sorry.  Cheers, bp

We appreciate you drbill....just tune out the unnecessary noise 👊🏼

Not taking a side here at all. I see your point…but my big problem with GS was the deception. The shill reviews, the people you didn’t know were associated with a product. The deleting of competitors threads and responses in favor of advertisers…the censuring and banning of people that had different opinions from what was being pushed. I just feel like Drbill isn’t hiding anything and isn’t overtly pushing his box.

It's interesting you should write this post about "extreme separation" because a lot of the time I'm reading people saying they bought a summing mixer for greater separation.

And I'm always thinking - "hang on" ....  there can be no greater separation than a digital stream - it's not even a signal path just a very fast stream of addresses coming off a digital storage device!

Aren't they actually buying a summing mixer so they can have LESS separation as electronic physical channels have cross talk within a summing mixer.

Some of this stuff still seems mis-understood or at least a bit mythical.

It's counter intuitive or so it seems to me.

Yeah it’s really hard to describe what exactly is going on and why things are different!

99% of the time when I’m all ITB I’m listening through basic converters, either Focusrite or RME but mostly just the built in MacBook or PC converters. On the couch with headphones or patched to KEFs or NS10s in the living room. And what always happened for years; levels of every element were either too hot or not enough. Remix over and over again. Finally, after years of feeling depressed I realized it’s because those elements are just going to never glue up the way they do in dense electronic circuits.

It was a pain for me to wire up the console for monitoring off the board again. - I was using it like an oversized tracking chain for years - but that’s when the glue came back. I could put things louder or softer and both options sounded equally like music. Everything sounded like music. But I knew from earlier experience nobody else is going to hear it that way, because their MacBooks and phones don’t have transformers and oversized power supply, but my listening chain does. And also I was listening through the 2bus summing amps.

This time though I really spent 6 months deciding whether I was imagining things, because it’s so hard to explain a reason why it sounds so good. It just sounds good. I started bussing things out to faders, it’s like the 2bus is a canvas that you can paint into. I’m not able to get the extreme ITB separation if I use it. Things kind of gel as one. (There are new summing emulations I haven’t messed with, ie LUNA, not trying to give folks gas here lol)

I can’t record back as magically as it sounds in real life. And that has always been part of the “is it worth the effort” equation? But I’ve found the real benefit of mixing into summing or really sweet sounding 2bus chain is: I stop messing with it! It sounds incredible right away, I enjoy it and move on with my life lol

*ps.. I’ll use the board mostly like a silver bullet, or a few of them, ITB summing of instruments feeding analog channels that feed the 2mix. Just doing Master out to 2 channels gives the full canvas vibe as well though.

I’ve also done every individual channel out, so it’s more like a summing mixer. There IS a little more separation and 3D vibe, really cool. But it’s kind of hard to detect, you’d have to know to listen for it because it still sounds like using the same ‘canvas’. A slight kind of layered feeling, worth it for me since I have the channels so might as well, but the main sound is in the 2 channels

I think the misnomer about greater separation is the non linear effects of transformers and there effect on the perception of elements in the stereo field. Of course make up amplifiers contribute to this equation as well......

That's a good one, "Fun." I hate using rack gear, it's negative fun for me. That's the predominant reason I keep using plugins.