Interfaces (Avid) and outboard in a hybrid setup?

In a couple of larger studios I worked in, they had XLR barrel adapters hard patched into a few I/O on the patch bay so you could patch between a few pieces of gear if need be. Seemed like a really good cheaper solution, as it was only needed on the end of some older compressors mostly. Kind of a toss up, I ignored them as I played around with them a few times and could never really tell a difference.

I’m kind of curious to play around with something like that again. I’m reviewing the Undertone Audio preamps right now and they have a 600 ohm switch on them for the end of the chain. It’s a noticeable difference when mixing through them with their Pyra Sum summing mixer.

Thanks guys!!! I'm certainly not trying to produce a problem here. It's a BIG move to throw out my 72 channel Harrison desk so there's a lot of planning and soldering coming up so among all the stuff that needs to be done I just thought IF this could be something to look into, now's the time. My interfaces are 2 x Avid I/o 16 x 16 and 1 x Prism ADA8-XR. I googled specs for the Avid interface but can't find, but I believe I've read before that it's 10kOhms. I'm not worrying at all and I'll probably notice if there's any major difference in sound from any of the outboard I've got for a good while now.

drbill wow 120 i/o!! I concidered 64 i/o but decided to settle for 40 and chain my five units on the mix bus directly from unit to unit instead of having them all accessible in the patchbay

Thanks again everybody for the input!

That's a liberal assessment.
Chris

So you're going to add another HW insert to just the parallel signal? Why use another aux? Just put it after the other HW insert. 

But if your saying your folding in the first parallel aux into the mix, but sending that to another aux for more processing and folding that one also back in, so in effect having 2 parallel buses? I think you'll have issues there. 

Why are you trying to do that exactly? 

7-8 years ago I found a setup/routing for processing the whole mix on my analog desk/my outboard that I really like and have used for all styles: Firstly I do classic parallel comp of the whole mix using a (HW) Shadow Hills Mastering Comp. Then I started experimenting with parallel distortion (on the whole mix/sometimes sans lead vocal) from my (HW) Culture Vulture (Anniversary Edition) and really loved it. But on dynamic material which I do a lot I found the distortion too present on loud parts, so instead I used the compressed version of the mix coming from the SHMC into the Culture Vulture and blended that into the mix in parallel, and it was an instant hit.

Since the Culture Vulture doesn't have a mix pot I can't do the way you suggest (if I get what you suggest..).


Anyway this, and similar stuff, is what I want to do in the hybrid setup. I'm certain the parallel comp will work, sending the whole mix to an Aux and insert my Shadow Hills on that Aux. But then when I send from that Aux to yet another Aux and insert the Culture Vulture on that second Aux, will PT then calculate additional delay compensation, I mean...will it see that the signal going into the second Aux is already compensated for and understand that it has to delay further when doing HW insert on the second Aux?..

My signature says "Babe in the woods"...Could be in this case, as I find it hard to wrap my head around this thing. Grateful for any advice! But in two weeks I'll start with my new  setup and if it doesn't work I'll hear it right away and will probably know what to do to make it work, though dialing in delay comp manually would be tedious, especially since values differ at different sample rates

If I'm understanding correctly, and if you're on HDX Ultimate, yes PT will recalculate for the second Aux.  No worries.  But it will still be a 100% wet signal, right?  If not and you're trying to mix the SH signal, along with the SH into CV signal - you are essentially creating a parallel "wet/dry blend" of the two.  If you need to "blend" these two signals together, best to do it in the analog world.  If your analog device(s) - CV - had a wet/dry mix, you'd be 100% OK - just use the output of the blended CV mix as your final stream.  PT will delay compensate for the round trip no worries.  But if you're trying to "submix" the two together to create your final "blend - you're going to run into inter sample issues no matter what DW you use. Physics will not be cheated.  . Inter sample latency is something that no DAW can compensate for.  And for that conundrum - depending on how "close" to the beginning or end of a sample you may fall, or what sample rate you're mixing at, the "error" between samples may or may not bother you.  Even still though, if I need a wet/dry blend between an analog signal and a digital signal, I'll always try to accomplish that outside the DAW.

Higher sample rate sessions cut in half or quarter the possible amount of error that delay compensation cannot "fix".

If I'm understanding, the best thing you can do is to drop a pair of these on the output of your CV : serpentaudio.com/send-n-blend/. Then, the output of the send n blend is your final mix.

OOOrrrrrr - it's quite possible that I'm still not completely understanding your workflow.  I'd say just try it and see what happens.

Thanks again everybody for excellent input and taking the time to help out! In these kind of discussions there's often bits of experiences that are shared that I value. But I'm a bit embarrassed now... As I have the i/o's of my interfaces hooked up in patch bays it was very easy to try this, I just didn't think of it, because routing has been analog/console related for so long. Didn't have to insert the HW outboard even, I just (physically) patched the outs to the ins on the selected inserts. So I just took a stereomix and routed it the the way I described, took three minutes and it works! All three busses play in phase. Could perhaps run into delay comp issues when routing multichannel gets more complicated but now at least I know this is working. Thanks again! Over and out!