Hey guys,

Well, I've recently bought Mixbus 3 and have been intensively testing it for a about a week.

First of all, I'm well aware of the emotional aspects of making music and that when it comes to producing ITB, the general importance that the interface (GUI) has over the perception and overall "feel" of things.

Mixbus is one of those cases where the GUI transmits a very cool analogue vibe and, in fact, it does a bit more because it cognitively directs your workflow by limiting your options, which helps to keep you focused on the most important aspects of mixing, instead of tweaking a zillion things which most likely would cause a negative cumulative effect at the end of the chain.

So, I believe that, by encouraging you to do more with less, it does help you to produce better mixes indeed. By suggesting you to mix with its own built-in effects (which are indeed of high quality), it imposes some kind of quality control over your mixes, preventing you from even wanting to add another third-party plugin which, most of the times, may introduced unpleasant artifacts to your signal flow.

To sum up, its qualities, in my opinion, are way more psychological than technical. Its "soul" is the GUI and the workflow and mixing mindset that derive from it.

Soundwise, it actually does nothing to your sound. I've heard a lot of people saying that it does add some pleasant qualities to your sound just by importing some tracks into it, but it does not, as far as I could test. This sensation appears to be 100% psychological.

Mixbus is completely transparent, except for the tape emulation which introduces a short sequence of third order harmonics, nothing really fancy (there are certainly more complex and accurate tape emulation plugins out there). It does a great job keeping a clean and transparent signal flow. It doesn't introduce any undesired digital artifacts such as aliasing, which is great. It emulates analogue gear by being as transparent as digital can get.

It seems strange, since most people would expect it to introduce a lot of non-linearity which is frequently associated with analogue gear, but it doesn't. Neither its EQs or Compressors add any kind of saturation or distortion. They sound really good and are extremely transparent are very musical, though. The EQs have very tasteful and elegant curves.

However, if you take off the GUI, it actually doesn't do anything that couldn't be done in any other DAW with some quality plugins, free or commercial.

Harrison's marketing seems to suggest that Mixbus has got some truly special technical qualities, but as far as I can see and as far as I can hear, I'm more inclined to believe it's placebo effect. Its GUI kind of satisfies the analogue craving that plagues most producers nowadays, but soundwise it actually is as digital as digital can get (in the good sense).

Anyway, I did some simple (and amateurish) tests. Each image is named accordingly to its representation, i.e; "whitenoise, masterbus, lowshelf low", which means I've sent whitenoise to the masterbus and applied a full negative lowshelf eq. Here's the link to the full album:

http://s592.photobucket.com/user/rafaelmorgan2/library/Mixbus?sort=3&page=1

Here are my most interesting observations.

The mixbus tape really does add a smooth negative highshelf roll-off by itself, starting at around 5Khz, as you can see here:

http://s592.photobucket.com/user/ra...us/white_noise_full_tape.jpg.html?sort=3&o=21

And the mixbus tape does add a bunch of third-order harmonics indeed. This test was done using a 1Khz sine wave. You can observe harmonic spikes at 3,5,7,9 and 11Khz. It seems to be a very simplistic emulation. There are more faithful emulations out there.

http://s592.photobucket.com/user/rafaelmorgan2/media/Mixbus/1khz_full_tape.jpg.html?sort=3&o=19

The masterbus tape behaves a little differently. It just adds one harmonic at 3Khz, instead of a sequence of them.

Another interesting observation is that the track/channel EQ adds a small lowshelf filter by itself, even if you leave all the knobs in the neutral position. In other words, turn it on and it automatically adds a lowshelf, as you can see here.

http://s592.photobucket.com/user/rafaelmorgan2/media/Mixbus/trackeq_neutral.jpg.html?sort=3&o=13

There are other interesting things. All three EQs (track, mixbus, master) behave very differently indeed. The track EQ is more surgical and has a very wide gain range, it imparts a wide lowshelf automatically even if all knobs are neutral. The mixbus EQ has nice, wide and smooth curves. The master EQ is very very very subtle.

The compressors are all extremely clean and transparent, as far as I could test them. Apparently none of them produced any harmonics, aliasing or unusual artifacts. Most analogue inspired compressors also produce harmonic saturation in different degrees, but this is not the case here.

So, I really don't know why Harrison decided to make Mixbus into a DAW, instead of a plugin like Slate's VCC, Waves NSL, Sknote's StripBus, Sonimus Britson, etc...I honestly believe it was more of a marketing decision than a technical one, because I'm failing to observe what Mixbus does as a DAW that it couldn't do as a plugin.

Do I feel like there's some kind of "snake oil" thing going on? Well, yes and no. If Mixbus is actually helping you to make better mixes, then it's ultimately a good thing. However, I believe you can achieve equivalent results by using just a few transparent quality plugins on your tracks, a subtle dose of tape emulation on your bus tracks and, of course, a sound mixing methodology, independently of your DAW of choice.

A lot of people introduce a lot of distortion to their tracks by adding an exaggerate amount of analogue emulating plugins, and the truth is that most of these plugins, even the expensive ones, are nothing but fancy GUIs with crappy coding. Most of them produce a lot of undesired digital artifacts instead of pleasant analogue like saturation. Mixbus helps you to achieve a cleaner and deeper mix by being transparent.

To sum up, Mixbus is certainly a quality software, but it's got no magic dust. If you think it does, you're most likely being "fooled" by the vintage vibe induced by the GUI itself. There's nothing you can do on Mixbus that can't be done in any other quality DAW, in the same amount of time, if you educate yourself to keep your focus on mixing instead of pointless tweaking.

Should you buy it? If you already own a good DAW and are already comfortable with it, in my opinion, you shouldn't. I don' think it's worth the workflow annoyances. However, it's a very inexpensive piece of software and the company's technical support is terrific, so, if you really want to try it, go ahead. I don't regret buying it at all but I'm not sure I would've bought it if I had the chance to demo it first.

Regards,

R.

Ps: This is strictly my personal opinion. I may be totally wrong: In this case, please, feel free to correct me. I'm here to learn and I'm all ears.

 

Last edited: Jul 24, 2015

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Please check the URL for correct spelling and capitalization."

Anyways, really awesome review, never read something this honest and to the point

Thanks for taking time to test it and write all this, really appreciate it

 

Thanks brother. I'm glad you liked it. Just fixed the links, by the way.

 

The magic may be in the vibe and workflow. I think it's important to connect with your DAW and feel excited when you launch . . . for whatever reason. I am just about to upgrade to MixBus v3 and hope the magic is there for me. Thanks for taking the time to write an excellent personal impression of this workstation . . . it's helpful.

 

Sure. I agree. Art is, among other things, the manifestation of emotions, after all.

If you manage to use Mixbus as your main DAW, then it's great.

If you use another DAW, then maybe it's not worth all the hassle of interrupting your current workflow to export things to Mixbus and so on...

 

Great Review! I too bought MB3. I have mixed feelings (pardon the pun). I do like the workflow and the built in effects to give that analogue feel for mixing. As a all-in-one daw it's just ok. While tracking and editing can be done, it lacks features of the major daws...some folks may not need these features however. My biggest gripe is with stability. I am having a lot of crashes with Windows 7 and even more with Windows 10 (yeah I know it's beta). Harrison is a good company and I'm confident that they will fix the bugs.

 

I've been experiencing massive instability here on Windows 8 as well. I didn't think it would be fair to mention it in the review itself, since v3 is still very fresh and I'm sure the guys from Harrison are already working to fix it.

I don't consider Mixbus a full featured DAW as well. I'm not sure if it will ever be.

The thing is, I don't really like Ardour in the first place. It's not intuitive and it's missing a lot functions that have been implemented in most other DAWs over a decade ago.

In this price tag, Reaper is infinitely superior as a DAW.

In my opinion, the guys from Harrison should've focused on integrating Mixbus into other DAW's workflow through some kind of easy to setup routing system, as a mixing platform ONLY...This would be the way to go.

I think they should forget about marketing it as a DAW unless the have the funds to make some solid investment on R & D. It would take a lot of investment to become really competitive in the DAW market.

 

All the images provided are broken links

I have used previous versions
and maybe you are not using like the real Harisson Console...(talking about the new digital ones)

MixBuss is diffrent because It forces you to uses Group Buss and saturate them

So I don't know all of your test in the new version if there were done on the mixbuss

on a normal track everything should be transparent like any daw
But as soon as you use the mixbuss (in Summing mode) you normally achieve results that no other daw can achieve without the uses of 3rd party plugins

Good luck with your claims...the art of mixing is paying attention to details

Peace

 

That's strange...The links are working fine here.

Anyway, yes, I did perform several tests on individual tracks, buses and masterbus.

Like I said, the mixbus tape only adds a short sequence of third-order harmonics and does a slight high frequency roll-off. It seems to have a soft-clipping stage as well, but I can't confirm that. It's a very simplistic approach to tape emulation, in my opinion.

The masterbus tape reacts a little bit differently from the mixtape. It adds only a single third-order harmonic. Not even a sequence. Just one. It's really weird.

So, as far as tape saturation goes, it's easy to simulate a similar signal path and workflow in any other DAW. It's just a matter of adding tape saturation vsts to all buses and master bus.

Variety of Sounds's Ferric TDS is free and does excellent tape emulation, in my opinion. Tonebooster's Reelbus and Sknote's Roundtone are other very good and very affordable tape vsts.

 

I don't know about what happens in MixBus summing. If it is another results, as muse2love says, so what happens with wave if there no saturation?
I just know that:
Digital is maths.
Analog is circuits architecture.
Maybe in our case with MixBus there is phase summing differs from usual DAWs' summing? or what?

 

I don't know. I've been reading other opinions and tests about it across different forums and they mostly match my own.

Some people did null tests between other DAWs and Mixbus and it seems that its summing doesn't actually do anything to the sound except tape saturation. Samples practically null each other when the tape knob is at its minimal. They don't null completely because its tape saturation adds a tiny but of harmonics even when its turned all the way down, but that's it.

I don't remember where I've read it, though. I think it was on Gearslutz. There are a few gigantic Mixbus threads there, with as much good info as controversy.

Anyway, it appears that it does bus summing as transparently as any other quality DAW except for the tape saturation, which sounds cool on its own right but isn't the most sophisticated on the market.

 

thats a great review. thanks for the info.

I'm having a crack at v2 (yes, warez) to see if its worth the dollars and after only 15 min i'm convinced.

the limitations are the drawcard for me.
I'm an ableton user addicted to free plugins. And mostly I don't really know which i like and which are better so I haven't really nailed down a routine for mixing.
Usually I end up using the ones I've bought, but it takes a lot of time to get a mix finished.
Mixbus I think, will make me more efficient.

And I agree, I'd like to see it integrated into my DAW.
It'd be great if they licensed it to Ableton, FL, Logic, etc. and you could choose between the stock mixer and the harrison mixer.

 

Thanks, man.

And yes, it would be fantastic if it could be integrated into other DAWs indeed.

I used to work with computer graphics and there are countless different programs which seamlessly communicate with each other. Like V-Ray, which is a rendering engine which integrates very well with all major modeling programs via plugin.

So, I don't think it's something impossible to do with audio software. It's already possible to connect Mixbus to most DAWs using JackRouter, ReRoute or Virtual Audio Cable, but it's a very disruptive process. I don't recommend it.

Anyway, good luck. I hope you like it.

 

I had Mixbus 2, but never used it. I was intrigued by the possibility of using it as a front end for DP, since you can route audio from any DAW into it (through Jack OSX on the Mac side), and since it seems a little more Pro Tools-esque and straight-forward than DP for audio, but I was kind of hoping it would emulate a summing mixer (or at least a full-on Harrison analog console), which it apparently doesn't. Plus, at least on the Mac side, you can't run it without Jack OSX, even if you intend to record and mix completely inside Mixbus, which is a bit intrusive. Also, there's no MIDI or VI support (maybe that's changed with Mixbus 3?). The actual audio/mixing capabilities seem fairly decent, though, better than DP. I just wish Harrison had worked to emphasize its analog-emulation properties, especially summing, which seems obvious. I wound up going with Pro Tools.

 

Although it has limitations,V3 has midi and supports Vi's. Jack is no longer required.

 

Yes the images are okay now...they were'nt when I consulted the link earlier


be careful to disengage all eq and the limiter on the master buss

Because it is engaged...be aware that you did to have to real test result about it's tape saturation capabilities
And try to test as if you would perfom a summing task and not a mixing one

peace

 

Well, I did perform all sorts of tests with all possible combinations I could think about, my friend, including the ones cited on your observation. How could I test the mixbuses effectively if not by summing, after all?

You already know my conclusions. It does absolutely nothing to the sound when summing. It's fully transparent, except for adding a few third order harmonics (depending on the tape drive intensity) and a high frequency roll-off (also depending on the tape drive intensity).

So, as far as I could see, there's nothing "special" about its summing algorithms...Or about its tape algorithms, for all that matters.

Like I said, is it a nice piece of software? Yes, absolutely. Is there some sort of voodoo thing going on in its algorithms spraying some sort of magic dust on your tracks? As far as I'm able to obverse, not at all.

Anyway, you can always go and test it yourself. Post results here if possible.

 

@RMorgan I know this is an old thread but just wanted to say thanks for the good review on Mixbus. I was about to start a new post with a similar topic, but unlike many others it seems lately, did a search and found your review. Even though it's been 8 months, I doubt enough changes have been implemented to discount the jest of what you wrote, so you saved us from having to rehash the already hashed.

 

Good review.

My one point of difference is sound. I listen to DAWs using reference monitors and actual music I know well and
wave files from other DAWs. I do it this way because we as humans do not listen to white noise and signal wave
forms in isolation all day.

I have also compared CD tracks via spectrum analysis and notice slight bumps and dips from Daw to DAW.

 

Last edited: Mar 18, 2016

i like the mixer gui.
but... impot a file crash, area selection crash, render a file crash.
nice review.