External Summing

[buzzaudioguy]

wait a second....

the original post seems to say 'there is no question that external summing sounds better' --- where i have read only posts singing the tune just the opposite, that they cant hear anything. this is from probably 10-15 articles from pros and non-pros alike. i suppose the difference could be from coming out of 8 (or more) pristine 24 bit DA converters.

now granted, if you use a Rolls device and sum through 2 avalon preamps, or neve's, etc, you'll definitely get something, but...

any links to discussion on the actual sound of external vs. internal summing?

Yeah, but you see, I didn't do anything like that yet there was a BIG difference! And this was just with the stuff I had there... nothing fancy added. So obviously there IS something going on. I'm sure all of this is strickly personal preference and opinion. Not like you can't make a great sounding recording "in-the-box". I'm know there are many MANY guys out there who can do it and kick the crap out of my summed mixes, but for me it works and it does make a difference. I say just try it with whatever gear you've got laying around and see if you can hear it good or bad. You might be surprised. I know I was.

[glue unit]

Back to the guy talking rotary switches. I think my description of the five way pan switch in the summing mixer was too vague. I changed it around a little. What does anybody think of my messy schematic for a summing mixer like the fullcrum but unbalanced with 5 position panning



Add more positions to the switch and more resistors and you get more pan positions If you wanted a balanced one you would have to use a 4 pole switch and duplicate everything except hook the input negative to the circut and the output to aditional busses for left and right negative. Do the shunt like the original schematic here:

http://www.groupdiy.twin-x.com/albums/u ... cedmxr.pdf

I think the great thing about a passive summing, excuse me if I'm blowing air out my ass here since I have not tried it yet, is that using a cheap all discrete passive summer like this through say a rmp would probably blow away most inexpensive mixers since the summing would be perfectly clean and the rnp's amplification would be a lot better than all the gain staging going through my M2600 MK 2 for instance. Besides it would be a handy way to plug in all the outboard gear on mix before the summer.

Maybe we should move this to the DIY forum though

[cwileyriser]

I think a neat thing to do here since a passive pan pot would be impossibele without some kind or custom made pots, correct me if I'm wrong here, would be to use a single rotary switch instead of the two switches like the folcrum or the design linked to in the earlier post.

We're pretty much on the same page, except that personally I wouldn't really care about having the ability to do mid-L and mid-R. Just L-R-center would be fine for me (like the Folcrom). But that's the cool thing about DIYing this - you could try the 5-way and love it.

The Folcrom has the pushbuttons because (I think) it's the best way to do it - mechanically sound, easy to see whether a particular channel is L/R/center, etc. But for a DIY project, rotaries seem better because they're easier to install and they're relatively cheap. Plus I looked for a long time on the Mouser site and some others and couldn't find what I thought would be a usable latching pushbutton switch. If I had found one, it probably would have been fairly expensive - too expensive for me to want to buy 32 of them, I'm sure. Rotary switches, I can find. Plus with the rotaries, I can put on whatever kind of cool-looking knobs I want!