Recommendations for first piece of outboard gear....

1176 of some type. A few of them live on my vocal and bass inputs.

Have you already built your tracking chain? That will impact your process plenty while still keeping your mixing itb until you find itb inadequate for your needs. I would start with hw on the a side of a/d and then build a solid mixbus (if a 2bus is essential to your process). This way you have front and rear covered which i think has most impact on the outcome. Then if still lacking wow going hybrid in between the front and rear end is easy. At this point also lackings have probably shown themselves.

Edit: and while starting to look at bus units, as i agree that stereo comp is esential, it’s much up to knowing what is the sound you are after. There’s plenty of “industry standards to go by”

I’m itb now probably forever but what impressed me. Keep in mind there’s no money in this, no time saved in mixing, and every single piece of hardware is a recall issue because it might break or need maintenance even if it has switches

On a bus? Something with megaton of distortion (not a fan of distressor and fatso that much though) or a lot of sounds to mangle drums or stomp down background vocals or something to mix into. There is a lot of stuff but of not clones and still made Smart C2, Drawmer 1978, or something with tubes in it or a Kush Tweaker on an individual track to mess it up. Hey if you want squeaky metallic clean and can piss away money, you can still get Maselec.

For tracking? I’d get something useful and clean to solve problems on the way in. Not an 1176. It’s far too easy to crush something with it and ensure the vocals never come out of the speakers. If you do more than a couple vu off, this will happen but often a couple of vu is not enough. The blue stripe clones are distorted but also spitty and gross. These are a problem on a lot of big records and you can hear it. There are used Daking FET II and III for dirt cheap that make every flavor of 1176 sound like crap. I love them and would get some if I tracked really but guys paying for tracking in 2024 is unusual. Daking also have the new vca comps that try to emulate their behavior and the little labs ll2a with two knobs and a killer demo that uses ad633 analogue multipliers to make a linear vca to simulate behavior of optical compressors but more consistently. For something else classic and also “automatic” there are dbx 560 of course.

EQs: something with inductors that saturate and ring or something? Maybe a used cool channel strip of some sorts just to solve some problems on the way in like even the clean grace one or the daking mic pre eq with the weird trident eq. A real api 550 type of eq is very useful. Cut the box, boost some shelves, add a little sound. Surgical parametric can fix problems on the way in with guitars and drums and also lower latency than digital eqs in the artist’s monitoring mix if they are not monitoring digitally. If they are going digitally, there is no point in 2024 unless you want to take out the nasty before hitting other stuff on the way in.

my outboard is mostly for tracking, or for sound sculpting later, but when I do final mixes, it's all ITB.  so I'd recommend a compressor.  What kind depends on what you are going to use it for (I don't think you really said yet?).  And if the answer is I don't know, then save your money until you do know.  I bought outboard stuff and quickly sold it when I didn't really have a purpose for it.  when I finally understood why I really needed a specific piece, then I've kept those.

This is an interesting observation and one I don't have sufficient experience to disagree with, but my limited experience is not letting me agree either. To me analog has a warmth and a pleasant lack of pristineness that digital doesn't have. Digital just seems too perfect, almost sterile and I don't think anyone ever could say that of analog.

I guess this is, in part, my interest in an analog outboard piece of gear. I must ponder this further.

LTL silver bullet:

It’s a stereo pre, it has EQ built in, the mojo circuits can be driven hard enough reduce dynamics in a very musical way, almost like tape or a compressor, but obviously different.

Everyone should have one!

They’re all just tools. Get analog tools that distort pleasantly then or have cool warm transformers. You can always get something like a fatso or silver bullet. You can get warm from a few hundred dollars (art vla, fmr pbc-6a, used 500 series) to decent rack mount stuff (the cleaned up nevey stuff is pretty warm while 1073 clowns are often metallic) to sky is the limit stuff.

The digital stair step compressors and limiters that just act based on the pcm samples sound horrible. Beyond that digital is quite good.

The spitty analog compressors like a blue strip 1176, Alesis 3630, distressor most of the time, yamaha 2020, dbx 160 outside of sweet spots, smart c2 misused on middle attack settings and no auto release, sound pretty horrible often. Just not as randomly horrible as an 1176 emulation like the CLA. So do a lot of the analog compressors over compressing like the black 1176, art vla, la2a, la4, dbx 160 often, etc. we could go on but there’s not really a lot of difference to my ears versus over compressing with a functional digital compressor doing the same thing like smash something with renaissance compressor, mdwdrc2, pro audio dsp dsm, molot ge, even oldtimer (free with pro tools. ME is ten bucks from it) and the new softube three pack of emulations even. Murky and gross and loses a ton of detail and high end.

A lot of people don’t even know how to set their “classic” gear with small sweet spots that can do a couple of things. You can hear it really get in the way of powerful vocalists on a ton of old rock and classic metal records. They just get murkier the louder they should be getting so the screams are often masked by the guitars which might be quite small in the mix much of the time if not cleans. Or the vocals are too loud like on a lot of pop and country but then the color is more apparent. They’re over compressed. Of course right now with multiband limiters and far too long lookaheads on them (to scale the attack to clean up the distortion because the programmers cannot write something even as not very functional as the nasty old Waves ones. The cleaned up L1 25th anniversary edition can be set to be better than the multiband garbage too), the mix and fader moves are undone by events that happen in the future. On certain horrible pop diva records you can even hear the limiter pretty much ducking the vocal and making the reverb send louder than the vocal. And the kick might be twice as loud as the vocal and more forward in the mix from high passed bus comps and poor monitoring or wanting it to sound like a bad club or car. I’m not even talking about the awful distortion yet, just the mix levels. Now we have intentionally distorted limiters where running the mix through them makes it sound like Marshall mids with tweed murk and make the Oxford enhance / safe mode that sounds like a pedal seem pretty clean.

The terms warm vs. sterile are commonly used in discussions on analog vs. digital. But what do we really mean by that?

I think it would be really good to define these attributes and understand what is really sonically happening when we experience these feelings, to be able to distinguish between preferred units and technologies. Dan is on spot with many arguments regarding distortion.

As I see it the “warm” is made up of two things, EQ (usually a rolled off high end and low boost) and distortion (which acts as compression and thus usually at extremes contributes to the EQ’s effect). This does not equal analog nor tube nor a specific transistor. Many of these just happen to have one or more of these attributes in the physical nature depending of course on the circuit to what extent it is present. This doesn’t mean that you could not digitally achieve a similar result, which usually would be in a controlled context.

What I believe is the magic (as I have figured it out in my head, no science here…) is the slight random and fluctuating outcome analog and especially tube equipment offers (we are talking very slightly here) that thru build ups, tracks interacting with each other creates a slight phase shifted, distorted soundscape, contributing to what we usually would call a 3D effect of sound. This is pleasant for the human ear. And I do believe this outcome is possible to achieve digitally likewise. As I have understood this randomness is coded into emulating plugs as well? Or I could be wrong.

But all and all my point being. When we describe our preferences I think it’s important to try to understand what actually is happening there and not buy into the myth of commonly accepted facts of how a tube, analog or digital sounds. I have been so many times blown away by what lies behind a song, a track or a sound.  

In my opinion, the 2 bus is priority.  A good stereo bus compressor into a good stereo EQ printed through a nice stereo AD.

Along with SB...
Audioscape and Coil are on my "Dream List".

I_probably_wouldn't screw up my Tract with them.
Too much.

Sterile might have been a poor choice of word. If I think about a ProTools Carbon, I don't think its sterile, but it is insanely clean, uncolored. My initial feeling around that was probably "sterile" for lack of a wider experience around a lot of good gear.



I remember listening to an older song on Apple music through my system and as an experiment, I pulled out an original pressing on vinyl of that same song. I don't remember the song but I think it was something Hendrix. 

While I can't sit here and say the Apple music version was sterile, what I heard, probably more accurately "felt" from the vinyl through the exact same system was remarkable, and the A/D converters being used in this case were hardly amazing.