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Post by andersmv on Sept 25, 2023 16:36:38 GMT -6
(I've got the preamp review video posted later in the thread. Have not gotten to the Pyra-Sum yet) I searched for a thread on this and didn't see one, which is a little surprising. I just got a Pyra-Sum in for review as well as 8 channels of UTA Preamps. Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to work on video review on all of this. I'm going to compare my API Box Console mixing setup with the 8 API Preamps going into the Pyra-Sum, as well as the 8 UTA Preamps going into the Pyra-Sum. I just want to focus on the sonic aspects of this thing. It will be really awesome to hear what a UTA Console would sound like for a mix, but I'm more curious to hear it compared to my API Console, as it doesn't have any additional buses outside the Program Bus. Does anyone else have one of these? Anything specific anyone is curious about that they would like me to explore? -EDIT- I’m adding the videos on this post now that I’m done. Attachments:
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Post by Bat Lanyard on Sept 25, 2023 19:00:41 GMT -6
Definitely looking forward to following your review of this setup and your impressions with the workflow.
I've kinda gone nuts gearing up the last six months over a move and I'm in between studios (insulation above the two rooms I'm building in my house just got removed today). I picked up the Pyra-Sum and two MPDI-4's so looking forward to seeing what that vibe is. I got the A-B-C version though as I'm moving off of Flock patchbays and going back to all Redco's. I have three summing mixers, Chandler's, SumBus A&B outputs and a Tree Audio Stem that I'll consolidate at the Pyra-Sum via the patchbays but also putting the A and B busses on the bays to have them just in case.
A bit crazy but I'm looking forward to the options and hearing what everything's doing. I like the idea of all the different flavor choices. I'll have the direct paths to A/D if I want to bypass the PS altogether, etc.
As usual, impressed with the quality of the UTA stuff. Didn't expect a summing mixer to weigh that much. Such great quality (I'm a fanboy).
Edit: Also liked the options with the PS switches to be able to mult out of PT and just mute and compare instantly. Pretty cool features.
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Post by deaconblues on Sept 25, 2023 19:52:38 GMT -6
I’m looking forward to hearing about both of your experiences. I’m new to his products and am pretty impressed.
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Post by drumsound on Sept 25, 2023 22:32:36 GMT -6
I do have to take issue with the nomenclature. Drums-music-vocals. Like drums and vocals aren't part of the music... EV's a drummer, WTF?
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Post by bricejchandler on Sept 26, 2023 1:28:40 GMT -6
The Undertone preamps are awesome
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Post by thehightenor on Sept 26, 2023 1:42:27 GMT -6
I do have to take issue with the nomenclature. Drums-music-vocals. Like drums and vocals aren't part of the music... EV's a drummer, WTF? It’s true, drums (bass) and vocals are the song. The floppy wobbly harmony bits from guitar and keyboards I can take it or leave it (well almost  ) OT …. those UTA pre’s are very nice indeed and priced accordingly. I don’t any more pres but if I did these would be on my radar for sure. |
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Post by lowlou on Sept 26, 2023 8:05:31 GMT -6
Oh yeah... Can't wait to read your thoughts on the unit.
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Post by deaconblues on Sept 26, 2023 10:00:49 GMT -6
I do have to take issue with the nomenclature. Drums-music-vocals. Like drums and vocals aren't part of the music... EV's a drummer, WTF? I thought this too, but check out the one sheet that shows the namesake pyramid ( Pyra-Sum One Sheet)…the drums cascade into a bus with the rest of the instruments which becomes the Music Bus, that then sums with the vocal bus. I got in the habit of working this way on a hip hop project earlier this year; cool to see it baked in on the Pyra-Sum. Stem creation on this must be a breeze. |
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Post by thirdeye on Sept 26, 2023 10:03:50 GMT -6
I searched for a thread on this and didn't see one, which is a little surprising. I just got a Pyra-Sum in for review as well as 8 channels of UTA Preamps. Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to work on video review on all of this. I'm going to compare my API Box Console mixing setup with the 8 API Preamps going into the Pyra-Sum, as well as the 8 UTA Preamps going into the Pyra-Sum. I just want to focus on the sonic aspects of this thing. It will be really awesome to hear what a UTA Console would sound like for a mix, but I'm more curious to hear it compared to my API Console, as it doesn't have any additional buses outside the Program Bus. Does anyone else have one of these? Anything specific anyone is curious about that they would like me to explore? I am curious what you end up thinking about the Pyra-Sum bussing, especially regarding the drum bus feeding into the music bus and not being able to process the music bus without the drums. There's a way to patch around it to keep the drums out of the music bus, but it was a little strange to wrap my head around. It sparked some creative thinking for me definitely. I did not end up buying the Pyra-Sum, but Undertone was so awesome at answering all my questions. |
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Post by andersmv on Sept 27, 2023 10:39:36 GMT -6
I believe you can order a version of the Pyra-Sum with normal "bus 1, bus 2..." labeling. That's probably how I would want it as well. In the spirit of the design, I'm going to try and split everything out of the mix the way they want you to on the mixer. It's going to be different for me with drums, as I send all my drum tracks to a pair of AUX sends. One is always a clean passthrough, one is compressed heavily so I can blend in some parallel compression. Those two go to a main drum bus that I always send to a pair of outputs on my API console when I'm mixing. I've never really needed to send kick, snare, and "other" stuff to separate stems. Again, I'm going to do it that way with the Pyra-Sum video song, but I might get creative and mult some stuff out on the drums. I think Eric did a similar thing in his video explanation of the Pyra-Sum.
I'm going to work on a separate review of the UTA preamps on Friday. I've played around with them a bit, you can get a bunch of different sounds and drive the ever living snot out of these things when both the transformers are engaged and the 10 dB transformer pad is engaged. Comparing them with my API preamps, the UTA still have a lot of clarity, but sound a little fuzzier in the midrange when the transformers are in (in a very pleasing and good way). The top end on the UTA is fully extended, but softer and more polite on your ears at harsher frequency points that the API's. The high end on the API's has a much more "glassy" feel to them. It's easy to drive the API preamps as they're on my console and have faders, but there's a narrow chunk of headroom you have when you drive them hard. It goes from "nice drive" to unusable pretty quickly when you really push them. The UTA preamps definitely handle being stomped into oblivion a lot better than the API's. Definitely worth doing a separate video on the UTA preamps, kind of surprised there's not anything else on YouTube about them. I'm happy to put the effort in when no one else really has.
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ericn
Temp
Balance Engineer
Posts: 16,099 
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Post by ericn on Sept 27, 2023 12:32:10 GMT -6
While it looks like a couple of screws might get in the way, at least there is enough room for a strip of tape !
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Post by andersmv on Oct 1, 2023 9:41:02 GMT -6
Decided to do a separate video focusing on the preamps (instead of doing it as part of the Pyra-Sum video). This was a big help for getting to know the sound of the preamps, I can already tell there's going to be a lot of cool combinations for pushing stuff with the Prya-Sum and UTA Preamps. I've actually used the UTA preamps a lot in the past, so many of my friends have them in their studios. Always using them on drums and they sounded solid, but this is the first time I've been able to sit down with them for an extended period, push them, and compare them to other familiar preamps to get a frame of reference. You can get away with pushing them quite hard, especially on drums. It seems like it's similar to pushing the API's, they get smoother the harder you hit them. They sound just as "full spectrum" as my API preamps and clean AEA TRP. The high end was more polite and smoother than the API's no matter what setting I had the UTA's in. Similar enough to the TRP when you take the transformers out of the UTA's, but the mids do sound ever so slightly more congested and compressed when compared to the TRP. I would say the majority of people are going to love that about them, so it's definitely not a bad thing. They get close, but not quite as transparent as the TRP. The top end on the API's sounds kind of "glassy" compared to the UTA's. Again, my take away is that the high end is always clear and present on the UTA's, while staying smooth. Drums... I know it's not the most impressive demonstration in the video, but the point gets across. If you don't push these preamps a bit on drums, you deserve to have your engineering card revoked  . You see in the video, I showed two extremes. Really clean and then really pushed. I would have tried to find a happy middle ground between those two if it were a "real life" session, but I think showing the extremes is a lot more helpful in demonstrating the sound as opposed to what I would want to dial in. You can shave off a good 2-3 dB of transients quite easily with the UTA's without really noticing. When pushed hard, you can tell a tonal difference in the attack of the kick drum and the overall tone of the snare especially. I wish they would make a two channel preamp for us "poor folk" so I could at least have them for snare and kick. I'll just have to save up for 4 channels at some point. Off to a good start here. I'm excited to mix through these with the Pyra-Sum and hear what they do on a mix when pushed. |
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Post by thirdeye on Oct 1, 2023 9:57:42 GMT -6
Thanks for taking the time to do this! Very informative.
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Post by andersmv on Oct 2, 2023 9:56:25 GMT -6
I'm really digging them, they sound amazing and are super versatile. I can't really think of anything else that will go from TRP clean to Chandler TG overdrive, I suspect they're going to offer just as much versatility on mixes when plugged into the Pyra-Sum.
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Post by andersmv on Oct 9, 2023 21:17:09 GMT -6
Just wrapped on the Pyra-Sum video. Two big things I wanted to do here. First, see how 8 API preamps running on the Pyra-Sum compared to a mix on my Box Console. Second thing was experiment with the UTA preamps, since there’s a lot of different combinations. I even put together a “Super Console” where the drum bus was API preamps, music and vocal bus on UTA preamps, and the mix buss on the Coil Audio tube preamps. Wowza, did that sound crazy!
Obviously, if you get the Pyra-Sum on a patch pay with all your hardware, there some potential for some crazy parallel processing. It was tough enough tearing my studio apart a few times to do this video, I just didn’t have the time to go down that rabbit hole. This is purely a focus on the sonic possibilities of getting preamps involved with it as a summing mixer.
Theres a link in the description with high quality mix files of all these different passes through the Pyra-Sum (and more). It’s all organized, labeled and level matched.
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Post by lee on Oct 10, 2023 10:18:37 GMT -6
Andersmv, I appreciate the care you take in these reviews.
I usually want to hear the biggest extremes first (like between the digital and the colored or pushed examples), so I can get a feeling for the differences. Then I can determine if the more subtle, "real world use" differences are significant enough to make the new thing worth paying for, and your Pro Tools session lets you do that. It definitely sounded a lot less subtle than on YT.
The -10/pushed example on the UTA really kept a ton of detail despite the loss of transients. My experience with some summing mixers is that you get the imaging difference from smearing of the transformers. I didn't get that with either the API or UTA examples. I can't tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing!
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Post by lowlou on Oct 11, 2023 3:39:02 GMT -6
I start to think that I should ditch all my projects of buying a small console and come back to my initial plan : the Pyrasum.
What bothered me, in the current layout of the Pyrasum groups, was that I could not process all instruments tracks together (all instruments BUT the drums), apply compression and tape emulation for example, and have them sum into the music group with the drum group, to apply further gentle processing.
It bothered me also that there was not a "FX group" for returns.
But I now realize that you can do that if you add small mixers (OTO bébé chérie for example) prior to the channels of the instrument group.
Then what you end up with is a more elaborate architecture, in my view. All the separated instruments (synths track, guitar track, piano) input on an OTO Bébé Chérie mini mixer which goes to one channel of the Pyrasum instrument group (on the Pyrasum channel you can apply compression and tape emulation for example). And the other tracks of the Pyrasum instrument group are free... So now you can have a track dedicated to FX returns for example. If you get another OTO Bébé Chérie, and input your FX returns into it (6 stereo channels IIRC, on the OTO Bébé Chérie), you now have a new FX return group. And there are more channels to populate too... Which is absolutely great.
It costs a LOT to get this kind of group layout on a console. Daking MK2 console, 16 channel version, starts at 80K+ dollars.
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Post by lowlou on Oct 11, 2023 3:44:03 GMT -6
Thanks for the review Mill Sound ! Me I'm more into the routing capabilities of the thing, not so much the sonics of it. It's pretty transparent. It's what you make of it. You demontrate that excellently.
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Post by andersmv on Oct 11, 2023 10:24:43 GMT -6
Don't forget that you can patch stuff in at the preamp in/outs as well. There's also the Direct to Buss section that you can send to separately, or in parallel. I'm still not exactly sure what you're wanting to do (because I don't know your setup), but there's probably a way you could set it up without a mixer involved.
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Post by lowlou on Oct 11, 2023 10:54:13 GMT -6
Oh yeah I know ! Processing following each preamps...
Buying a Pyrasum and adding small quality mixers to it is like buying the routing abilities of a three meters long console ^^'...
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Post by andersmv on Oct 11, 2023 13:08:21 GMT -6
Oh yeah I know ! Processing following each preamps... Buying a Pyrasum and adding small quality mixers to it is like buying the routing abilities of a three meters long console ^^'... For sure! I thought of a lot of cool things I could have done when I was using the Pyra Sum with the API Preamps on my Console. I will say, if you plan on driving your preamps with the Prya-Sum, you'll really want an output knob on your choice of preamps at the very least. If you got the normal API 512c preamps or the old 3124 racks, it would be really hard to do drive the API's and set up your bus levels effectively. I appreciated having the faders on my console, so to set up API's with the Pyra Sum I would highly recommend the newer models with the output controls. UTA gives you the -10 pad on the end, those were perfect for driving their pre's. If I were going to set up the Pyra-Sum with my API Box Console, I would find a pair of 500 series units that would pair well on each "group" and put those in the console. Since I can route the 527 Compressors in the master section to inputs 1/2, I would probably swap outputs going "to" the pre's from the Pyra-Sum and send Drums to 3/4, Music 5/6, Vocals 7/8 and Mix to 1/2. That way, on the mix buss, I could put a pair of 500 series EQ's and route the 527's there as well and have compression/eq over everything pretty easily. I might seriously consider doing that sometime in the future. I REALLY want to build a mini console setup of 8 Coil Audio preamps one day. Maybe instead of only setting those up on the Pyra-Sum, I'll set up the API/Pyra-Sum things like I described above, and patch the Coil Preamps into the 8 buses through the inserts on those API preamps on the console. You can run the Coil's at line level and mix through them. That way, I can control how much "coil" I want on the sound. I'm starting to think a full Coil/Pyra-Sum setup might be overkill considering how much just a pair of Coils can add on the mix bus. Ya, that sounds pretty slutty.... |
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Post by Johnkenn on Oct 11, 2023 13:26:30 GMT -6
Maybe it was the sections of the song that made the back and forth sound different, but the Pyrasum did make things objectively wider.
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Post by andersmv on Oct 11, 2023 13:43:00 GMT -6
Maybe it was the sections of the song that made the back and forth sound different, but the Pyrasum did make things objectively wider. It didn't matter if it was the API Preamps or the UTA ones, the stereo image did change when I pushed them harder. I was OCD making sure levels and everything were uniform switching between preamps and settings, I had a signal generator on all my stem outputs and made sure I matched things every time. When you have cascading buses, levels between sends can change depending on how hard or not you're pushing your preamps. I was also checking Left/Right balance each time as well, it's obviously a little harder to make sure everything's right with the API's as they're not stepped. It was really easy to match since they were on my console and I had the faders. The UTA's on the other hand were ridiculously consistent. I only saw 0.1 dB of difference (at the most a few times) between preamps, and that was two different units to get 8 channels. I didn't want any jackasses complaining about any of this, so I actually did fix those 0.1 dB differences on all passes. There was absolutely NO reason to be that anal about it, I was extremely impressed by the tolerance. I had to check things on every pass anyway, so I just went ahead and did it anyway. All that to say, I agree with you. There were some differences with the image, and it had nothing to do with me mismatching anything on my end. It's all consistent, there's a difference on the Pyra-Sum passes. |
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Post by lowlou on Oct 11, 2023 14:38:50 GMT -6
I've rarely (if ever) come across audio gear reviews better done than yours, Mill Sounds. It's really extremely nice to watch, and soothing ! Even the little intro is a nice touch. Nature, I needed that today. Plus, it seems you're reviewing only the best gear out there at the moment. All the gear I'm most interested about. I LOVE IT !!!! Congrats and thanks.
And yeah Mill Sounds, your plan with 8 Coil preamps IS very slutty indeed. Like you, I'd rather handle gain with a preamp that has a proper output attenuator (finely stepped or digitally controlled, even the gain), and then use the Coil in line mode. The sound is excellent at line level. I can't wait to get two or four 70. I got myself a good deal with a big shop, if I buy 4. I'm getting to know my two 286 right now (got the second one recently). It's a trip. I wonder what would be an ideal Coil balance, across a mix. Not too many 70 in serial maybe ? Maybe try to have them all hanging at the source (like if the tracks were on tape), to then put the 286 on the main groups above ? Or the contrary ? ^^'...
I've contacted Spectra1964 a year ago I think. i want them to make create a well matched, stepped (but not switches I think, maybe I should ask for switches), stereo version of their preamp/comp/limiter golden rack 500 module (forgot the name sorry, it's STX something). The idea would be to transparently kill the transient spikes at each Pyrasum summing junction, while amplifying at the same time, and maybe polish things with a super super mild compression, almost nothing. Bill (it's Bill, 75% sure) said "give us 18 months". But shhhh... Top secret.
xxxxxx
Louis
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ericn
Temp
Balance Engineer
Posts: 16,099
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Post by ericn on Oct 11, 2023 17:58:55 GMT -6
I've rarely (if ever) come across audio gear reviews better done than yours, Mill Sounds. It's really extremely nice to watch, and soothing ! Even the little intro is a nice touch. Nature, I needed that today. Plus, it seems you're reviewing only the best gear out there at the moment. All the gear I'm most interested about. I LOVE IT !!!! Congrats and thanks. And yeah Mill Sounds, your plan with 8 Coil preamps IS very slutty indeed. Like you, I'd rather handle gain with a preamp that has a proper output attenuator (finely stepped or digitally controlled, even the gain), and then use the Coil in line mode. The sound is excellent at line level. I can't wait to get two or four 70. I got myself a good deal with a big shop, if I buy 4. I'm getting to know my two 286 right now (got the second one recently). It's a trip. I wonder what would be an ideal Coil balance, across a mix. Not too many 70 in serial maybe ? Maybe try to have them all hanging at the source (like if the tracks were on tape), to then put the 286 on the main groups above ? Or the contrary ? ^^'... I've contacted Spectra1964 a year ago I think. i want them to make create a well matched, stepped (but not switches I think, maybe I should ask for switches), stereo version of their preamp/comp/limiter golden rack 500 module (forgot the name sorry, it's STX something). The idea would be to transparently kill the transient spikes at each Pyrasum summing junction, while amplifying at the same time, and maybe polish things with a super super mild compression, almost nothing. Bill (it's Bill, 75% sure) said "give us 18 months". But shhhh... Top secret. xxxxxx Louis Yes output attenuation can make all the difference, ironically last night I ordered 4 Sescom inline attenuators with pots for the go bag, still need a pair of nice precision resistor based for what you speak of. |
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. You see in the video, I showed two extremes. Really clean and then really pushed. I would have tried to find a happy middle ground between those two if it were a "real life" session, but I think showing the extremes is a lot more helpful in demonstrating the sound as opposed to what I would want to dial in. You can shave off a good 2-3 dB of transients quite easily with the UTA's without really noticing. When pushed hard, you can tell a tonal difference in the attack of the kick drum and the overall tone of the snare especially. I wish they would make a two channel preamp for us "poor folk" so I could at least have them for snare and kick. I'll just have to save up for 4 channels at some point.
