Hello, Gearslutz!

At mixanalog.com we've launched version 2.0 of the world-first fully manual, real-time controllable online analog processing service.

It's a web application with a graphical user interface, that allows you to control our analog gear over the internet in real-time.

Try it (it's free until the end of the month) and let us know how you feel!

The app: Control Analog Gear - Online Processing | mix:analog

How to use the app:

1. UPLOAD a file you want to process
2. press PLAY and TURN THE KNOBS
3. LISTEN to the processed audio, while it is streamed back to you in real-time, at up to 192kHz and up to 24-bit lossless
4. switch to the DOWNLOAD tab and get the file

List of available gear:

• BURL B80 with BDA8 and BAD4 units
• Distopik FC670 (Fairchild clone)
• Distopik EQP-1A (Pultec clone)
• Distopik Precision MEQ
• soon Telefunken M15
• soon Bettermaker Mastering Limiter
• about 8 more pieces to be added this year

Answers to FAQ:

• we modded the gear mostly with our "in-house" custom electronics, a few digipots and lots of relays
• until we get the booking feature working, remote control access will be give out on the first come, first served basis
• internet speed of 5Mbit/s is recommended, but customer support reports successful sessions at 2Mbit/s
• you can download your processed tracks in .WAV or .MP3 formats, .OGG and .FLAC will be added to the list later
• we provide full support for Firefox and Chrome browsers
• MIX:ANALOG is developed by Distopik d.o.o., an audio technology R&D company based in Slovenia, European Union

More questions will be answered in the comments below!

Thank you!


Roadmap with votable features: Trello

Wooooooooooow I’m going to use this for an upcoming mix.

Just tried it! Very nice! Got some help from Bojan on the chat cause it was not working properly. Congrats guys!

Not working for me. I realized it’s the gmail signup thats the issue. But Facebook works! Laaaaaame. Lol.

Seems great. Hopefully you add some harmonic excitement/saturation units like a Culture Vulture, Black Box, or Vertigo unit.

Any videos to show the actual gear in action? To say that I'm skeptic of the authenticity of the gear would be putting it mildly. You don't just have an original Fairchild 670 just like that.. well maybe some do but to recouperate the cost of operating one that is hooked up 24/7 just doesn't seem feasible. Or are these actually better off being turned on all the time?

Never the less. These kinds of websites always seem sketchy unless there is true pedigree. It's easy to show a bunch of tiny images of the supposed gear in use and then use something completely different in the backend.

Anybody ran some test tones through the system to double check that it's actually analogue equipment being used?

Sorry for being so skeptic and pessimistic but somebody's got to ask the difficult questions as none of them have been even remotely answered at the website (the "FAQ" is stupidly simplified with absolutely no relevant details).

Yes, I know it's a "free" service at the moment but that is irrelevant and besides the point.

How does this work when 50 people want to use the Fairchild at the same time? Is there a queue? Would users have to "book time?" I mean, I can understand it if users are just processing audio through fixed settings and waiting on an email with their audio attached, but the idea that users can interact with the gear by moving knobs in realtime must mean there's some kind of 1:1 ratio of audio streams to hardware units. Are there an unlimited number of Fairchild's sitting in a room waiting for audio to pass through them (mmmm....infinite Fairchild's)? Also, how are the analog units being controlled? When I move a knob on a GUI, is there someone making that same knob movement? Some machine that's turning a knob?

Sorry if this is answered somewhere already, I'm at work and just saw this.

Yes if the unit is not available, you have to book a time slot.

As for the part regarding how the unit is controlled, I'm curious about it too.
Did you develop a special tool, some kind of robot that turns the knobs ?

Already stated. Digipots(knobs) and relays(switches).
The interface sends control messages to the corresponding digipots and relays. They would replace all of the controls. It's just like the plugin recallable analog hardware. Same stuff. The mechanical part is pretty simple. The interfacing and file delivery system probably took more time.
Pretty cool service.

My bad. Should have read more carefully.

I fished around the mix:analog site trying to find any hint of the actual hardware being used. Couldn't see it. Just plugin looking pictures of gear. I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt... sort of, but I think if you're touting analog gear, maybe you should show the actual analog gear being used.

Everything seems doable, but the Fairchild 670 is definitely swinging for the fences. You're talking about an extremely rare and expensive piece of gear. Let's be generous and say that every half hour yielded you 5 minutes of processed audio, every 24 hours. At 1 Euro per minute, that would be 240 Euros every day. So, it would only take 187.5 days to pay the $45,000 price tag of a Fairchild 670. I don't know, I guess at some point if the thing really took off, you could have the service and hardware running 24/7... but that's not really how this older analog stuff works- there's gonna be some downtime.

ANYWAY, I really like the idea of this kind of thing. I think it's a really cool way to be able to rent analog gear without having to have it shipped in. Just looking for transparency. I don't think anyone will fault you if you just said, hey, this is an Undertone UnFairchild, or these are Tubetech PE 1C's, etc. I really don't want to accuse mix:analog of anything- I could be 100% wrong in doubting the gear. I'm just a skeptic by nature.

Good luck with the launch!!

Not one picture of the gear or and studio? You can afford gear for like 80000$ but not like one smart phone image or like hiring a photographer for 200$ to take some epic images for such a epic business idea?

Yeah. I’ll pass.

I mean it's free to try though lol. Why not just give it a shot before you totally write it off? Great marketing and great ideas are not always synonymous.

I have to agree with this, it is kind of odd... I really hope the OP will come by and answer some of the questions and update their site with actual photos and videos.

If they get a plate reverb I’m going to loose it.

I think it’s highly unlikely that a business would be using fake gear to do this and go to all the trouble. Seems a very complex and needlessly dumb scam that would be discovered so quickly.

It’s good to be skeptical but gearslutz can be so hostile. Prob best to have an innocent until proven guilty creed.

This seems like one of those genius ideas which could easily generate a lot of profit with careful execution and good funding...You know, picture one of those hangars in China full of racks, but instead of servers, it would be storing cloned classic mixing hardware...If people pay to rent software, I'm sure people would gladly pay reasonable fees to use it...And they could market it in plugin format, to make it accessible to anyone using any DAW.

However, yeah, I understand a lot of people would be skeptical. There's a lot of snake oil in this industry...So, show us pictures and videos or it didn't happen.

I just chatted to the guy from company. Seems v legit and he was helpful. He was perfectly upfront and explained that the Fairchild is a clone unit built to same specs as close as possible to 670. That’s totally fair enough and I don’t see any false advertising, simply incomplete info as yet. It’s just early days for them as a company for the service etc. They aren’t even charging yet or had the advertising/ website complete. Give it a try. Dude seemed to know his stuff and appeared honest to me. I think it’s awesome!

That’s super sketchy and it’s terrible marketing. It sows doubt and hurts trust for a business that is completely dependent on its customers trusting its doing what it claims. They should remove the Fairchild moniker immediately.

We'll soon be adding the Telefunken M15 and maybe a Redd 47 based overdrive/saturation unit to the system, for your harmonic excitement/saturation needs. I've added your suggestions to our roadmap at https://bit.ly/2xQ5ckq. The features are votable with a trello.com account.

We understand your skepticism and will record a video or two. Here's a 2017 video of Bojan Šernek (CEO), demonstrating the digitally controllable Distopik Precision MEQ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvOGaTwK9f0).

We sold this unit to Studio RSL and build another one. It's the big black box without the knobs in the photos.

The Fairchild 670 is actually turned on all of the time. Our company is not recuperating the full costs of the production and the service at the moment. We hope to change that in the following year.

You are welcome to run test tones through our system. Please, mail us the results to [email protected] if you do. We are hungry for feedback.

Thanks for the FAQ critique, we'll update it.

Only 1 user can access the “Rack1” device bundle (Pultec EQP-1A + Fairchid670 + Distopik Precision MEQ) at a time and this is the only device bundle we have at the moment. Remote control access is given out on a first come, first served basis. The default session time is 15 minutes, but you can extend it for 15 more in the app. A booking system is being tested and should be available soon. We hope to make “Rack2” available by winter and a few other individual pieces (like the before mentioned Telefunken tape) in the mean time.

AriaMastering does it with a robot and presets. We use our custom electronics, usually based on relays. These electronics are then controled by microprocessors that are connected to our network.

Only a few knobs were replaced by digipots. Most of the time, we use our custom electronics. Digipots can’t be used very much, because the resistance values that are available don't fit most use cases. There’s also the problem with digipots not having enough voltage or current headroom for demanding circuits in e.g. tube gear.

Thanks for taking the time and fishing our website. You’re right, it absolutely needs to be pimped. You can find some images of the gear on our Facebook profile (https://www.facebook.com/pg/mixanalogcloud/photos/).

We are genuine audio nerds who want to make analog as easy and affordable as plugins. You’re welcome to ask us anything and we’ll do our best to answer it and be transparent.

You are correct, the Fairchild 670 is not the vintage one, rather it’s more like the UnFairchild in the sense that it has been built recently in a modern shop, but following original schematic to a T. We considered carefully what components to use and used original tubes where it made sense. It even has the original tube power supply.

The 2 Pultec’s we have are also of modern production, like the Tubetech PE1C. However, they are made by the original schematic and have original tubes.

It’s not that we can’t afford a photographer, the server room our rack’s in, is very small, cluttered and not-visually attractive at all.

Here’s an image I just took with my smartphone. We'll get a pro photographer to take some shots when other start-ups are done moving to the new server room and it's tidy again.



There are nicer images on our Facebook profile (https://www.facebook.com/pg/mixanalogcloud/photos/)

We've been thinking about the plate reverb for some time now. The days of your sanity are numbered

Even if one would replace the gear with plug-ins, it would still be too much trouble to go through.

Thanks for pointing it out. We'll update the website soon, but first we need to fixing more stability issues and bugs within the app.


Hello, OP here!

You seem to know exactly what we dream of and you are right about the execution and funding. R&D of our custom solutions took A LOT of time and A LOT of funds.

Images and the video from above:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/mixanalogcloud/photos/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvOGaTwK9f0



We are happy to see this much engagement and will continue answering any questions!

Should we change it to Fairchild 670 (clone), would that be ok?

First of all, best of luck with this project!!

Now:

By all means, if you are using clones, you'll need to be up front about this! Let alone using Pulse Techniques/Fairchild logos on your page...

Will you have that sit in a dedicated, sound proof room?

It would absolutely be an improvement. Is your 670 clone made by a particular brand, or is it something you bout yourself? If it’s the former I’d say you should include the brand.

I have an ADL 670 at my studio and would never, ever claim to have a Fairchild on our website or promo. It’s damn close, but it’s just not the same. If it were, every home studio with a chameleon labs pre and warm 47 would claim to have a Neve and a telefunken

I couldn't get the audio to play. I could see my waveform, but after hitting the "play" button, it wouldn't do anything and would reset the button after a second. I changed some of the EQ dials anyway, and attempted to download the result, but it just sat on the "Your download is being processed" page until my time ran out (it was a four-minute audio file and I left it on the downloading page for at least ten minutes).

We used Drip PCB, original tubes and original tube power supply to build it. Our Pultec EQP-1A clones are built upon home-made PCBs and are hand-wired. The UA1176 that is not connected to the app yet, is built upon mnets PCBs. I'll gather as much info about it as I can and put it in the device description on our website.

Thanks a lot for the warning!

Thanks a lot for the warning!

Yes, we'll get a dedicated room for it.

Were you using Opera or maybe Safari? If you open up the live-chat on the website, we'll be able to help you almost 24/7. If we're asleep, please mail us at [email protected] and we'll check the logs for what went wrong and help you the next day.

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We took a look into the archives, found some videos and updated our YouTube channel with a playlist named R&D Archives.

There's 4 videos that will hopefully provide you atleast a bit of proof.

Here's the link: YouTube

We'll record a new video soon!

That'd be a lot more accurate and way less sketchy. Fairchild 670 vs Fairchild 670 CLONE is a difference of about 40000 to 50000$.. so yeah, it's worth being extremely detailed and fair on this point unless you want to come across as scam artists.

Thanks for pointing it out. We had a team meeting just for this topic today. We'll fix all the naming and write detailed descriptions of our gear.

Maybe you should create similar but different names for your units, since they're clones, just to avoid possible legal issues, you know, Fatchild, Fakechild, Bearchild and so on...

A lot of plugin developers do that, so there must be a reason...Then you just add the usual "based on a famous blablablabla...".

I was using Chrome on Windows 7, and it was right before you guys went offline for maintenance, so maybe that was the problem. At any rate, I tried it today with Firefox and it worked.

And it really did work, and it was awesome! There's very little latency (similar to using an Acustica plugin), the GUIs were nice, and I quickly got my processed file. It's very very cool!

This is a genius idea. You should set up a webcam in your server/hardware room and give people the opportunity to watch their sessions live if they want to. This would help to build trust.
Great idea - has a huge business potential.

That's exactly what we're going to do. We're writing down all the details and voting for the names as I'm writing this

It's nice to see all the network tweaks be worth it. I'm glad to hear it worked!

There won't be much action, but I guess we can try it.