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Message: [QUOTE="Boswell, post: 300784, member: 29034"] The point is that I believe the same mix engineer mixing the same tracks ITB (digital) and by external (analog) summing would end up with two different-sounding results. One mix would not necessarily better than the other, but there would be audible differences. The tenor of this thread is that there is therefore an implicit and unexplained difference between summing digitally and summing externally in analog. If you could capture the [i]exact[/i] settings used for the analog mix and reproduce them in the digital mix, the differences should disappear. So maybe we should be looking at [i]why[/i] the engineer would arrive at different mixes and see if we can re-work the user interface that governs DAW mixes to give it more of the feel of an external mix. I would agree with your noise figures if we were talking about white noise, but D-A converter noise has other content such as code-dependent conversion errors and components from the power supply. I don't think it is possible to state accurate figures for this effect, simply to note that the mix noise floor will rise in the order of 3dB per input channel. By the way, no-one in this topic so far has mentioned one common reason for performing external analog summing: sample-rate conversion. It was how I got into using external summing. I had 96KHz tracks from which I needed 44.1KHz CDs, and the digital SRCs that I had available sounded horrible. It was a breath of fresh air to mix in analog tracks with a 40KHz bandwidth and then re-sample two-track at 44.1KHz. A lot of the clarity I am sure could be put down to the elimination of contorted phase effects in the 15-20KHz range, but this is one way I know to achieve the sound of a "direct-to-stereo" CD from recorded tracks. [/QUOTE]

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