They claim it's a gamechanger

For mixing poorly recorded live drums (which I end up doing all the time) I find AA1 to be indispensable. Thoughts?

 

The correlationmeter at the (drum) buss is your friend. And if it doesnt show any negative values, or you clearly hear any phase cancellations everything is fine.

If one of those things is not the case, all that phase alignment is doing is essentially eqing.
One can say the result is better of course. To me in the end it really doesn't matter. I never do it, too much work.

 

My transients would disagree with you... but be careful, they can be quite punchy.

 

I've seen a lot of people "aligning" snare and kick with OH, and also using (unintentional maybe) time alignment too, so they "destroy" the entire purpose of the Overheads. I saw a lot of videos on youtube where they align Rooms too .... so I say if not used properly it can wreck your drums pretty badly

I always check the phase of the snare/kick with OH and Rooms, but I guess for a DAW like Pro Tools it's good (as you can't flip the polarity just like in any other DAW unless you use a utility plugin)

 

Didn't expect to be coming to bat for this process so much in this thread lol, but this basically boils down to the argument of using phase for punch vs using phase for depth etc.

I understand your reasoning in what you're saying, but I think you're lacking an understanding on how this tool can be used in a deeper fashion. After analysis you use the < and > arrows to give you different phase relationships. I don't recommend (and never do) put the OHs or Rooms as close to the snare as possible as, like you said, that kills the purpose of the mic in the first place. What I will do, however, is choose a better relationship for the OH tracks in comparison to the snare that leaves the basic time position of the OHs in tact but gives a better phase relationship (plus/minus a few ms only), this can also be done to great effect with the room mics. I would have been checking and making small adjustments to the OHs phase anyways, this tool gives you multiple options for different phase relationships quickly.

 

You're right, I didn't mean to bat for the process, I was saying that, for me, this is a bit expensive for what it can do... and I can accomplish it with some stock plugins ...

 

Sound Radix makes some great products without a doubt, but it's just an evolution of an existing product – nothing more. If it was a game changer they would provide stems of before and after auto align does its thing so everybody can hear it. I bet it's a marginal difference from what you can achieve by doing it old school style.