I've been wanting to go "out the box" when mixing down my tracks to get some analog goodness in my final mixdown. Are there people here that do this? What kind of setup have you been using and do the ends justify the means? Is an OTB mix superior than a strixtly "in the box" bounce? Your thoughts would be great.

Thanks

 

There was similar question put to the attention of people at SOS mag and the reply was that unless you were prepared to spend considerable amount of money it was not a good idea.
Money had/has to be spent on top class analogue gear. Whatever you decide to buy (compressor? eq? limiter? One of each? Or just a summing device/mixer?) it will have to be a dual-mono, a stereo or two identical mono machines plus the addition of some top class AD/DA converters. It is also true that elsewere (here in this very forum but cannot find it right now) some say that there is little difference between converters found on a 100$ audio interface and, say, an Apogee.
So I guess it all depends on how much cash you are willing to spend for that "little" extra.

 

My advice if you want to do it that way would be to take your in the box mixdown to a decent mastering guy who already has the big $$ invested in his gear, it really does make a difference having a pro master the final tracks.

 

I have a lot of experience with out of the box mixing. And there is very little that can be done out of the box, that can't be done in the box. Complicated automated mixes are better in the box for me, But I love the feel of a real analogue studio console.

My favorite thing about mixing in the box is that you never run out of patch cables. LOL

 

out of the box is only worth the effort if you have quality hardware to run it through otherwise it's a waste of time. I saw a computer music thing with a french house guy who had some top compressors, eqs and limiters and run out and straight back in and it sounded so sweet but in the box can sound just as good you just have select the right plugs for the job. ,y advice is to think more preamps and recording through hardware into the software rather than outputting the final mix.

Recording instruments with quality comp etc as a start, sounds so much better than the dry signal into a standard preamp.

 

Wish I had someone to teach me about buying gear had to find out the hard way but hey that's what we had back then !Now Any reciept from the right music store & you can become a professional...

 

I always record through the nicest kit I've got at the front end - mainly decent preamps and a little bit of valve EQ/compession.
I'm not talking about really esoteric stuff, just mid range gear - it really makes a difference.

When mixing I used to get a good sound much more quickly with analog mixing and tape, but recording was much slower because you
had to get it right first time. I think this is part of the issue with out of the box mixing - you tend to have sorted the sounds
out before the mix and additionally tape flatters your sound (if well recorded).

After tape I used ADAT recorders and out-of-box mixing and it still sounds better at the first mix than my in-the-box stuff - I just
checked. I think this is because I tended to make more effort at the recording stage because of my analog tape recording habits.

Now I have various kit including a A&H R16 which allows me to record through the very nice preamps and EQ and mix through the analog
mixer. My mixes sound very good through this bit of kit but my work these days is very high pressure so I have very little time to
listen critically before sending a mix.

I suppose what I'm saying is that it's very hard to know if OTB is better than ITB but if I had to go either way I'd say OTB - but what
a faff - all those cables and kit.

 

VCC? anyone? This might be the ITB solution youre looking for!

 

I've always been fond of otb, i do that every time possible. I don't have that much money to have 2"tape and valve processors, but i have an honest 1\2"tape multitracker 16 tks, sync'd with an 1\4" carrying another 8 tks, so track sum is 22 (two tracks for the smpte) analog spirit 24\8 and analog compressors and eqs, gates and enhancers on ev'ry insert. Outboards are symetryx, dbx, aphex and the like, not behringers. I have a daw with 24 analog i\o too, 24bit\96 khz .When i can i do like this: record live up to 22 tks to the daw through mixer preamps and insert outboards. Then make all overdubs same way. Make all the editing on hard disk. At this stage i plug all the daw outs direct to the analog multitrackers and dump, with very hot signals (vu meter all red). Then analogue multitrack back in the desk and through eqs and outboards, and back to the 24 ins of the daw, to record every track with that tape compressed analogue sound. At this point all sound of the mix is done ok, software is just for volume automations, and i haven't touched one single digital eq or plugin.
This when i have the time and budget for, cause it's a long and complex process. When i haven't, it has happened to me to do complete recording and mixing totally itb. I must say that comparing the results, there's not big difference in sound. A slight difference in volume, when the material have been multitracked on analogue i can reach higher volumes without saturation when mastering.But apart from this, in my opiniom the difference is in the hands-on approach. having all settings under your hands makes easier reaching musical results. on the opposite, these are settings you can't change once they're audio-recorded. But it's easier to get the right sound at the first place when you're hands on and you know your gear, while tweaking a plugin, and changing window everytime you need to tweak another, can be annoying and so make instinctive work less spontaneous. But of course you can save it all and go change that single parameter the day after, so you get to the result anyway.
Most important thing remains recording good performance with good mikes and good instruments and sounds in the first place; and i believe that the otb or itb matter is much a question of genre too, for example mixing rockabilly vocals with a real tape echo, or recording black sabbath-like guitar with a real marshall instead of using plugins, can really make a difference. But in general my experience is like i wrote.