The digital realm has been a wonderful blessing when it comes to the recording and reproduction of audio. Or, has it? Digital recording has been chasing its tail in several areas in the recording process for a long time now . And why is that?
From the get go, engineers, producers, and audiophiles alike have been trying to improve upon what they feel are the audio shortcoming of digital recording and the negative characteristics they impart to the reproduction process.
Summing Mixer
Although not a new offering, analog summing mixers seem to be more and more relied upon to help with “digititis”. Leave it to the retail audio industry to find yet another way to capitalize on the prescription for these digital blues! Talk about reinventing the wheel!
Summing mixers are used to manipulate the computer held digital recording files that have been converted back to analog (via a digital to analog converter) by assigning and treating them as individual tracks, very much like a true analog recording console would do! Hmm…..well…then can one just use a good analog console or mixer to sum their tracks. Ahh…..Yeah!
Not only that, but a well made console or recording mixer will most likely have many additional routing choices, larger track counts, and more processing options than some of the more expensive summing mixers allow, not to mention the capability of recording analog to your digital computer! Am I missing something here?
Analog recording mixer