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Originally Posted by John Suitcase But, that said, headroom is the key to this discussion. Many of the problems that people have with ITB summing have to do with inadequate headroom. When adding several tracks that all approach 0db together, there are mathematical shortcuts taken, which cause certain types of unpleasant distortion. These distortions can be avoided by either a) lowering the levels of the individual tracks going into the summing equation, or b) sending the tracks to an external analogue mixer which will sum them there, then bringing them back into the DAW at a lower level. The sound of these two options are slightly different (significantly different if you're sending enough signal to your mixer to cause some clipping), but both solve the "digital gauze" problem. |
Well said!
It's only a matter of time before people learn how to mix properly ITB and maintain the same headroom they do on an analog board. Part of the problem is the damn 0dBFS scale on the DAW channel strips. Change that number to +20 and you'd probably have more people backing off their levels.
Mixing OTB is all about the things that Nathan and a couple others have cited: phase shift, intermodulation distortion, harmonic distortion, etc. Once you figure out that you can add those things without using a mixer or "summing box" then you'll be well on your way to a more "analog" sounding mix.
Brad