| My proposal to run through a pre set at unity gain is (obviously) realizable with a padding (3 resistors) before each Mic input, if a line level input isn't available or it doesn't have the flavour we want to add.
And also for the Folcrom outputs, there is a resistance at his output that stabilize the Z out factor (about 150 ohm) but also attenuate much more then necessary, so if we pull out this resistance or we change it with a greater value we can reduce the attenuation (and the "make up" gain to add) up to only 24 dB for a 16 bus sum (and 18 dB for a 8 bus sum) so we could add less noise or we could use only the -10/+4 switch of our daw to recover 14 dB without any further make-up pre.
The main thing is that i think it's not the analog summing giving "the touch" but it's the OTB analog reprocessing to adds some little variations, so i think there shouldn't be big differences between an 8 or 16 stems OTB summed with a make-up gain respect to OTB reprocess the whole mix ITB summed through the same pre.
So i think if i've to make (or i want to make) an OTB passage and i want to give me more "sonic chances" i could assign a different pre at each stem, and decide in this phase the final analog reprocessing, or reprocess each stem 1 : 1 through a different pre and sum them digitally, the flavour is added by the pre, not by the sum. The first method is better because i can listen the results immediately and reassign the stems to the pre's, with the second method i have to imagine the results of the single reprocessed stems sum before i've all the files. |