Stepped pots on 2bus important? And why?

Steped pots are no more exact than normal pots, they give a false sense of repeatability and precision. You want recall ability and ch to ch matching you need switched controls.

Thanks all for the responses and great knowledge! dan , really appreciate the in depth information…very interesting, I did not know any of that..I’ll be taking a look at those compressors for sure. Not sure I completely understand it all but I will do some further research on your points. Wondering, in respect to this info, would you say running a modern plug comp (UAD 2500/Molot GE) after my EQP’s would repair any imaging issues cause by the difference from the L/R channels? Thx

hardly anyone has realistic monitoring. Nearfield as it is now, ultra nearfield, is great at spotting problems but terrible at giving a realistic stereo spread and most larger monitors in most rooms are set up to be beyond useless. The amount of near field monitors that have a realistic amount of dynamics and headroom and stereo imaging is incredibly few. I would say only a handful and they’re not what people would expect and often stuff that itself has a sound like the Quested 8” actives or the Focal 6” with the Beryllium tweeters or real three way speakers (not most of the mini ones) that can be repurposed as quasi near fields but usually not a mere 1m away.

The only reason the producers took over with their shockingly low low levels of expertise and skill and apologizing for crappy misbehavior is because the industry is at rock bottom even versus a few years ago and is set up to siphon small amounts of money towards the top without having to give advances anymore or even get most artists working with anyone who knows anything. The productions aren’t there. They sound genuinely small and bad and gross. The huge ones started drying up in the 2000s when artists with huge sounding records suddenly got tinny and small and now most popular music albums are mixed like boy band music but worse by people who truly do not care at all about anything other than cleaning up the producer or artist’s mess, making them conform to everyone else’s mess enough for them and the label to sign off on it. There are some truly phenomenal younger or lesser known live performers and you may not like and their material might not be great but they can play it even if the venue is bad. The will and the money is just not there to record a realistic stereo representation of that, or even a hyper realistic, surreal, or impressionistic one, and release it. They don’t even have a throw the mics up and what comes out comes out demo. Instead what comes out might as well be dance hall with poorly recorded vocals to a distorted backing track with recordings you’ve heard before.

Look at the tools that get released that are clones of. Compare them to what I put in the advanced stereo linking down there. They have phenomenal control of the stereo spread with the ability to minimize pumping and perceived stereo shift. Yet go over to the purple site and watch them fawn over quarter century old digital processors that cannot be pushed and say they are the only thing that lets digital mixing feel analog and lust after Behringer or Behrigner level clones of almost 40 year old compressors that now will have drifted into pure distortion which they’ve never heard a clean modern type of not be what they expect and the sound of the volume modulation being by far the more noticeable aspect. I wonder what they would think of the Aphex hardware which pretty much sounds pristine like good digital or of the murky old digital things people used to use like Blockfish which definitely sounds more analog than a lot of analog gear but not in a good way or if they were around when MJUC came out and you could put that on your two bus and it’s instant slight volume control, fatness, and murk for 25 bucks. Manley Varimu sounds more digital and pristine even through the glycerine sound than a lot of what’s in MJUC. Or a lot of the cheaper 500 series modules from Lindell and now DBX just sounding like a pass through cheap interfaces because they are made from similar cheap circuitry. Now we even have plugins like the Glue and the Metric Halo Sontec that can emulate the phase shift of passing through inferior converters. Of course better converter into cleanish analog hardware and back into digital is going to sound much more digital than what the average current user perceives as “analog sound in the box” and will mostly be free of any major harmonic distortion and digital artifacts

Dan