On 12/13/2020 2:34 PM, geoff wrote:
A console being essentially a bunch of stand-alone preamps in one box,
for this purpose.
Well, yes. Not of much value when all you're recording is your voice and
guitar, even if you're doing 40 tracks of overdubs. But if you're
recording a live band and need to make a few headphone mixes, it's much
faster working on a console than digging up 20 mic preamps, patching
them to a recorder, and then doing your mixes in the box.
Recording to ...?
In my case, a 24-track hard disk recorder. With a modern digital
console, the computer, via the console's USB (usually) digital output,
is the recorder. And many digital consoles have a slot for a flash
memory card or USB hard drive so you can stack up WAV files on that, and
play them back into the console for mixing.
The main difference being your mix-down, with no editing of any other
sort, in any type of 'box' ?
My hard disk recorder has a fine editor. What it doesn't have that a DAW
has is signal processing, but the mixing console has that. It's just
like working with a 24-track Studer into a vintage Neve or API console -
except that neither is either.
But that doesn't bother me. And since I've never had a recording project
that used all 24 tracks, what I have suits my needs just fine. The
problem that I have is that modern Mikey-priced digital consoles don't
have dedicated recorder returns to the channels. Generally one hole is
shared with a mic and line input, so playback from the recorder involves
some cable changing.
Furthermore, some don't have direct outputs from the preamps so there
aren't enough outputs to feed all 24 tracks of the recorder - you have
to use bus outputs, of which there are rarely more than 16, and those
are usually what you feed headphone mixes from.
But all of those inputs and outputs are what make a traditional console
expensive. For the largest customer base, it's a digital world, whether
you choose to incorporate a console or not.
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