Analogue Summing VS Plugin Summing

True enough and certainly a fair statement. Of course the proof is in the pudding, and we're still a bit away from delivering the first units, but enough have been out in the hands of experienced guys who love it to make both Brad and I pretty excited to get it out to the general AE public.

But just for the record - I've been talking about this form of mixing for YEARS before the silver bullet ever became a product - touting the workflow and saying great things about other peoples products like Jeff @ CAPI and Colin @ AML. Both of their products really help in this "OTB SUMMING" respect (using that in the WRONG way, but it seemed appropriate.  LOL) but they are just preamps and don't go far enough for what I needed - even though I had them cascaded together. I needed multiple gain stages chaining into each other, and I needed subtle and controllable ways of controlling the staging, because too much is ugly and too little is too subtle, and mic pre's are really designed for this task. So the Silver Bullet and it's whole unique "tone amp" circuitry came about as I sought out taking the pre amp / tone amp thing further and deeper. Enter Brad McGowan's genius and voila!  Turned out Brad and I were both on the same "summing" page before discussing it.

As a matter of fact, thinking back, Im pretty sure Jeff thought I was crazy when I told him what I was doing. But it's been gratifying to see so many follow suit after I started talking about it online. I'm pretty sure I've sold a wad of vp28's, and EZ1073's. Before I started talking about this style of workflow many years ago, I never heard of ANYone putting their mixes thru mic preamps. Now it's everywhere. So.....take it with a grain of salt, but you can't doubt my opinion which came long before the SB.

As for your work flow - I'd suggest more experimentation with your 1073's. I'm not familiar with the Heritage, but I'd be surprised if it couldn't take you further than the VCC Neve emulation. But then again, maybe we're looking for different things. cheers, bp

When an analog console reduces it's THD to far below the specs of any ADC, you will have a tough time modeling something that exceeds the resolution of the best converters. A zero phase analog sum amp will be impossible to model as it's bandwidth is decades beyond the bandwidth of the best audio converters. Any model will be restricted to a 192k sample rate. An analog sum stage with -90 db crosstalk at 10k hz will also be hard to emulate.

We are at a point where analog circuits exceed the resolution and quality of any conversion. These circuits have a THD spec that are about 30+ db less than the best conversion. They have zero phase shift and megahertz of bandwidth no conversion can quantify.

There is a third way of mixing, not old school analog, not modern DAW mixing but advanced analog summing that exceeds the specs of any DAW mixer while retaining all the depth and surround that the analog summing provides. That allows the AE to selectively add error inducing processing, THD, iron, etc.

I'm not sure if you're joking, but just in case, here's a thread about it:

RGO "Louder Than Liftoff Silver Bullet" thread

and here's the product page:

Silver Bullet product page

"SUMMING" is the most mis-used, misunderstood word on audio forums these days.  Most people have no clue what it even is.  But they sling it around like crazy.  I've said this before and I'll say it again - summing ITB or summing OTB is virtually identical for all critical intents and purposes.  It's what's SURROUNDING the OTB summing network that brings the analog goodness that people love.

"SUMMING" is the most mis-used, misunderstood word on audio forums these days.  Most people have no clue what it even is.  But they sling it around like crazy.

WEll clearly some people know what it means I just thought that was funny. I love it when people throw around technical terms all willy nilly and attempt to reinvent the wheel on the spot. Happens all the time.

So, what comes nearest to a summing "plugin" might be mixbus, which is not just a plugin but full console emulation. It is also the most impressing kind of emulation i found yet in this field...
If it comes to another concept, which seems quite different, because not algorithmic like the very advanced longtime developed Harrison stuff, i found Nebula beeing very convincing in emulation of actual hardware sonic fingerprints, because it doesn't "model" the hardware but is able to, let's call it "sample" for simplification reasons, the hardware device's behaviour in several aspects due to dynamic convolution principles of operation.
So you could put plugins of a Nebula channel program of a console in each channel and other programs of gainstages in the following digital gainstages i.e. group busses and master. In result it is very, very close to the hardware. Sure, it will still not be the same due to what Jim already wrote about analog console summing.
But for my ears, if used correctly, it beats the shit out of most channel emus out there, even those which get rave reviews. At the cost of lots of computation power.
For a reason. The reason is - most of these emulations are not really good. Whatever their marketing may say.
YMMV.

Please pardon my ignorance- I'm sure there's probably something out there that already does this (Steinberg Wavelab etc)...but why aren't there programs out there that act as a summing unit? Say - you run your 2 mix out to another set of inputs that the different program records/prints. Then it bounces it down with its own super-duper-incessantly-hyped summing algo? I could see the wars starting now. But maybe I'm not understanding it correctly.
You know - Neve comes out with their "this is our digital version of the 88RS summing. Precisely modeled to give you the exact same results" blah blah blah.