Barry Hufker wrote on Sat, 07 May 2005 16:05 |
I don't pretend to know the "ins" and "outs" of all this, but one thought certainly comes to mind. Often times dealers will say, but an analog console (often vintage). Set the faders to 0 and then let your DAW act as the automation, bringing levels up and down, etc.
Someone may offer a better insight but I find this to be sloppy engineering practice. If the fader is up at 0 and no signal is being sent from the DAW surely just general hiss and any other garbage are still conveyed through the mixer and so to the mix.
Maybe in this context a digital mixer is preferable.
Barry
|
The zero's on the input gain knobs, the channel faders, the master buss faders and the stereo master fader on analog consoles are there for a reason. When everything is set to zero the console is operating at maximum efficiency, passing signal at unity gain through the component design. While it's nigh impossible to get a yardstick tracking and a yardstick mix with all knobs on zero, the closer that all are to zero, the less distortion you will exhibit.
On the question of whether to go with a digi console for DAW, I would rather go digi into a DAW than annie, but I'd rather not go into a PC/Mac DAW at all and track to stand alone linear HD-R's. Reliability is damn near 100%, no crashes, no latency issues, no defragging and no non-audio programs running in the background such as Windows or Apple components. There is a world of difference in digital devices that are designed and dedicated to audio only, than ones that run on PC/Mac apps that share resources with non-audio events. I have a 96 input annie console and two digi consoles and about the only thing that I use the big console for anymore these days is running headphone mixes. As far as going analog summing for color, I find that I can get all the color that I want, more of a palette and better control of it remaining in the digital realm on just about any application these days.