I remember there was this rumour about running tr909 hats thru a mackie pre and distorting the piss out of it but I tried tried distorting a mackie pre and I thought it sounded WAY to crunchy I couldn't find any spot after the redline that it just didnt sound like a overloaded channel strip.
I have a el fatso and it adds a good distortion thru overload. I aso have a speck model ssm analog mixer and let me tell you the overload on this NEVER gets too crunchy. Amazing headroom. The distortion from the channel strips is softer then the mackie channel strips or probably any cheap mixer. It has its own character for sure. I was a pleasent surprise because I wans't really looking for that. Right now I am maxing out a machinedrum max trim into the strip and it still sound fine
eh. Its crunched but in that good way.
Here its sunday and I had some free time so I made 2 drum loops with distortion from the ssm and from the fatso. I maxed out the gain stages of each piece to show its level of distortion.
With the fatso I did turn on the tranny but the compression is off. Now as max levels the compressor still kicks in a bit and so does the "warmth" but thats just the piece.
I didn't use the fatso in the ssm demo but I of course used the ssm in the fatso demo. The ssm trim was set to a level right before distortion so it was using the most headroom.
I did this to see the difference in distortion. Now as to what sounds best its all so subjective that we can't really say but the fatso is $1900 and I payed $800 for my speck model ssm with expander. So quick math says 800/56= $14.29 a channel
vs 1900/2 = $950 a channel
