Mic Channel Strips

[Snagglefinger]

What gives with all of these mic channels that are on the market? In addition to the obvious usage of a mic preamp, so many have compressors, de-essors, exciters, EQ's and such for processing a signal going into the board. I understand that a little compression might be needed to get a hot signal without distortion, or perhaps the need to de-ess.

But the common wisdom that I hear seems to be to try and get as un-affected a sound as possible when inputting a signal and do most the the dynamics and EQ on mixdown. So what's with all the bells and whistles? Are these channels also used to bypass the mic pre-amp when necessary so one can have their compression and/or EQ stuff available for mixdown? Or is what I hear to be the common wisdom not really the case at all?

 

[Tapehead]

It's only the high end mixers that may have optional compressors and in some cases some effects built into the channel strips. You won't see that on most equipment owned by people on this board. Usually these effects and processors are external (outboard) to the mixer and they're fed the signal by channel inserts which process the entire signal or auxiliary sends which process it separately for mixing back in with the original signal--all this depending on various circumstances.

Compression is a common process used during recording to smooth out the signal peaks and other reasons determined by the engineer. So is eq. Recording boards will have a switch ("flip") that bypasses the mic inputs when mixing down from tape/disk. That's about it I guess...