[John Suitcase]

I do some ITB, some analogue through my little Soundcraft board, and while they sound different, I don't know that one sounds better, necessarily. I think it really depends on the project, and what you're going for.

One thing to keep in mind when using a mixer to sum a mix is that you still have to watch your levels. If you're going to the mixer too hot, you can introduce some bad sounding distortion, which I've found is easy to miss for some reason. But upon making CDRs, you'll start to hear it on different systems.

Basically, if you mix ITB and keep your levels low enough to avoid digital clipping problems, you'll be fine. If you go analogue, you still need to have a good deal of headroom. The bottom end may sound better, things may sound a little warmer and rounder, but you will introduce more noise, etc.

And in the end, I think the advantages of analogue summing are small, but real.