[Scott Dorsey]

Tom McCreadie wrote:
Dave Plowman wrote:

To quote from the RME Totalmix User's guide: "The hardware input signal
can be passed on as often as desired, even with different levels. This
is a big difference to conventional mixing desks, where the channel
fader always controls the level for all routing destinations
simultaneously."

Which is why a decent mixer allows the choice of pre or post?

But it goes beyond a simple pre vs post issue: in certain scenarios involving
multiple splitting, reassignment and level-adjustment of signals, I find
software can often allow a more complex - yet quicker - patching...while
providing a clear overview of signal assignments, levels and interdependencies.

This is true, and it basically comes down to one thing: dynamic range.

With a high end analogue console where the rails are running on very high
voltages and the noise levels are low, you can be very sloppy about
internal gain structures and get away with it. It's not like mixing on
a Mackie.

But with a digital console where everything inside the box is being
represented by 32-bit floating point values you have a whole lot MORE
usable dynamic range than you did even with the high end analogue console
and that means that you can pretty much ignore the issues and just worry
about the total system gain without worry about overloading anything
internally or dropping too close to the noise floor.

Not that this was not the case with some earlier digital consoles that
used 24-bit fixed-point arithmetic inside, and some of those were very
very touchy about gain structures. Things are better now.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."