[Full Clip Audio]

I should have been more specific. I didnt mean to imply that we are not using patch bays. When I said all of our converters are normalled in and out of gear I meant through patch bays. We have two Audio Access bays. The top row of the top bay is all of our DACs and the bottom row is all the ins of our outboard. The top row of the bottom patch bay is all the outs of our gear and the bottom row is the ADCs. This way every piece of gear shows up in PTs easily. When I pull up a session I know exactly what piece of gear is on each insert and all I have to do is recall the hardware settings. If I want to use multiple pieces of gear on the same channel I simply patch it at the patch bay.

My hesitation with using outboard directly infront of a summing mixer is that I lose the ability to do certain things. First of all I cant set delay compensation for the outboard the way I can now. Also, I hate the idea of not being able to do a quick "bounce to disk" with hardware. If I'm just doing scratch stuff for instance I dont want to have to set up all my groups and outputs to the summing mixer and my inserts. I also lose the ability to print things as easily as I can now. Ideally I would like to have my mix and processing done before I even set my outputs to stem out to the summing mixer and simply use it for summing and off to my two track processing.

If I only have 16 inputs on a summing mixer I dont see how I could have processing on individual channels. If I sent the kick to a 160VU and then to the summing mixer I have no way of grouping it with any other outs from the DAW going to that summing channel. I would quickly run out of channels. What am I missing?

Thanks!