Using 1 piece of HW on stereo sources?

Yeah, you don't want to get involved doing something like this. I totally understand the impulse behind it, but no, not a great thing IMO.

Yeah, exactly Mix, drum buss, stereo whatever. With one mono piece of hardware, thinking mostly compression or eq.  Wiz had a way of lining things up at least at the start, by putting a single sample right at the start and lining those up, iirc. Not sure if over the course of a few minute song whether delay compensation might drift?

 Cheers,
 Geoff 

So you're still talking about a hybrid mix setup, even if you're only running one groups with hardware inserts.
I'd like to call in a friend . .. drbill

. Yes.....  What can I do to be of service?

Some of us are more equipment challenged than others.

 Cheers,
 Geoff 

Ah. Gotcha. 

The way to do this would be to print your track in 2 mono tracks. 

That said. I'm not sure I'd do it. Pretty big pain to do it. 

I'm glad to report that this is 100% doable with absolutely zero phase issues.

I've run a single hardware insert across dozens of tracks. To make it practical, you need a scriptable DAW like Reaper. I have a script that I wrote to do exactly this. You select all the tracks that you want to print through hardware and the script plays and records every track through that device without having to lift a finger.

This can save you 50% of your hardware budget for mixing (a mono unit will do the job of a stereo unit) IF you are patient and you have the time to wait for the renders. I'm pretty sure that many people don't have the patience for this; however, many of us have more time that money. Needless to say, you have to keep recall notes as you go in case you have to go back and re-render stuff. In my experience, rendering as you can be fun as you don't have all options available to you all the time. You commit, and then go to the next track.

We used to freeze plugins mixing ITB 20 years ago because CPUs couldn't keep up, and we made it work. This is the same thing but using hardware.

Don’t do it. Use a dedicated stereo compressor made for that purpose. You won’t be able to monitor your fake stereo compressor in real time and mix into it. The channels will be unlinked so stereo image will shift unless you sum them to mono and feed that as the sidechain to both sides. Then your compressor will compress the center 6 db more than the sides and will not see any out of phase content and you won’t be able to adjust the faders in real time to compensate.

that’s a good point, you can mid side eq the stereo side chain send before summing to mono for the side chain.

But yeah at that point just use a plug. The glue is good. It’s better than the ssl native, waves, and UAD. Presswerk is even cooler and has an easy mode bus compressor simplified layout. Kotelnikov GE has presets to compact a vocal or drum bus without changing them drastically that work well. These are 10 to 130 bucks. For 130 bucks what good hardware can you get? No presently manufactured hardware can do what Kotelnikov and Presswerk can do at any price point.