Mixing in DAW or Analog

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Nik6teen

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Hi everyone, just wanted to say that all the material posted on here is of so much help to me, I love reading it. Just curious as to how many of you do your final mixing within your DAW, or if you output it back to your analog board for the final mix? Not sure if this should've been posted in the 'mixing' area, but I thought that it dealt more directly with the DAW users, so I posted it here. I recently read about how 'summing' the tracked material in an analog environment creates a warmer sound and a better stereo image (this was off the cubase.net website). Does anyone have any thoughts about exporting the audio tracks back to the analog environment for final mixdown? I've read a lot on this bbs, but haven't seen many articles that covered a whole lot about what the 'standard' on this subject is.
 
Nik,

> how many of you do your final mixing within your DAW <

I do all mixing within Sonar. Anything else makes little sense because it loses many of the advantages of using a DAW:

Total recall

Level, pan, send, and FX automation

One plug-in can be used on as many tracks as you want

Once the mix sounds right it's a single step to export it to a single wave file, versus having to wait while the mix plays in real time as it's recorded

--Ethan
 
There are plenty of differences in the HW vs. DAW mix routes, and some will want to be higher or lower on your own list of priorities depending...
-The sound would be different, but by how much? And will the difference be better in your situation? Equipment is a factor- Will sending the audio through another set of your converters and analog chain be a real improvement?
-Will recording/mixing skill (or lack of) completely over shadow the difference?
-Working style; Traditional analog HW gear and mixer lends itself to some very useful skills to develop.
-Changes in many ways 'how' your mix might turn out (for natural physical reasons as well as equipment sonic differences)
-Fairly large cost differences.
 
Thanks for your replies, anything is very helpfull.

To be more specific, I am recording in Cubase 2 SX and have a 16 channel Mackie mixer. So yes, all the processing, automation, effects, other bells and whistles will be on the audio within the software domain. My soundcard (a Terratec Producer EWS88 '8 ins/outs') is capable of sending 8 channels back to the board, possibly group channles like drums, guitar, vocals, blah blah. And I could record this stereo mix after being ran through the analog board back into the DAW. Could this possibly add more dimension to my mixes? ...or is the loss of digital quality not even worth it? Thank you for all your help.....I realize that the best answer to this is probably just to experiment, but it always helps when someone guides me in the right direction :)

thanks
nik
 
Nik6teen said:
Thanks for your replies, anything is very helpfull.

To be more specific, I am recording in Cubase 2 SX and have a 16 channel Mackie mixer. So yes, all the processing, automation, effects, other bells and whistles will be on the audio within the software domain. My soundcard (a Terratec Producer EWS88 '8 ins/outs') is capable of sending 8 channels back to the board, possibly group channles like drums, guitar, vocals, blah blah. And I could record this stereo mix after being ran through the analog board back into the DAW. Could this possibly add more dimension to my mixes? ...or is the loss of digital quality not even worth it? Thank you for all your help.....I realize that the best answer to this is probably just to experiment, but it always helps when someone guides me in the right direction :)

thanks
nik

That depends on your In the Box Mixing skills, but I think if you know what your doing on both a DAW in the box mix would beat the mackie YMMV. You need to get to the more expensive boards to get that 'analog magic'....Now a day there are a bunch of 'summing boxes' that offer just summing in the analog domain while retaining all the total recallability of a daw you can even put H/W efx in between before the summing and get best of both worlds the most cost effective of the summing boxes is the Folcrom (~800)a complete passive summing box which needs a pre amp for make up gain.
 
i really dig mixing in my daw man, i can do it analog if i want but the ease of automation and lack of wires make it my choice. Only downside i can think of is that i miss moving the faders manually. Its like playing transformers with your music.
 
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