Quote:
Originally Posted by laser  Ya know, within JW's purist "clean is everything" position may be the crux of this thread.
The color in my mixer is perfect for me. It sounds "classy and expensive". To get more flexibility in my busing, I bought a Speck XtraMix. It is a very, VERY clean sounding unit (some would even call it boring, but for my intended use it was perfect).
I demo'd some Avedis E27s recently and, for various reasons at the time, it was easier for me to hook them up to the XtraMix for testing (without my mixer)--pure MAGIC!
The highend was perfect and the sound was very rich and pure. Hell, between the Xtramix and the E27's you could build a very, VERY nice sounding console.
A few days later, I hooked the E27s up to my mixer and it was good, but had little of the magic that the E27/XtraMix had.
Same EQs, same subjective tastes from the observer----different system, different opinion. Simply put, the XtraMix allowed the E27's iron and flavor to come through in spades. My mixer didn't.
This thread tells me that, when people say they didn't like a particular piece, it may just be that the piece didn't fit well within their system.
Just one man's viewpoint--I return you back to your shit slingfest.  
Laser |
I've had exactly the same experience last week. Well, ok with a bunch of different eqs, but the xtramix really makes the transformer based stuff shine. My old desk had a nice friendly slightly fuzzy tone, that pushed my 2500 on the mixbus in a nice way. the API just picked up on the tone of the desk and opened it up, made it punchy. With the xtramix that didn't happen, there was no extra tone from the desk at all, so I had to insert an eq on the buss, but still it's not the same of course, but I got used to the "clean" really quick. So I'm using the 2500 in another way now: crank the xtramix and feed the 2500 something HOT. The xtramix is great, and the service of Speck is (almost) unequalled. It just took the whole thing to another level.
hate gear? eh.. no. abuse gear beyond intended purposes? yes please
BTW I kindof like my 2 SSL line amps. they have a thing going that I cannot find in other gear ( which is too nice, too real, too fat, too slow, too dark) works very very well on triggered percussion (synth triggered with drumpads) + comp inserted = JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP
EDIT: I do electronic music, funk, some hiphop too (duh is also electronic)