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It's no good getting quality outboard stuff if what you are going to record has to go through a cheap audio card. Make sure your audio card ad/da converters are very good. I wouldn't go crazy with the super hi end ones at this point of my studio setup, RME quality does a good job. I personally got an old Motu 828, and discovered Black Lion Audio modifies them, inserted an 8 ad/da converter of a superior quality, and a new clock. And for a reasonable price as well.
But again, if you are happy of your sound without ever leaving the internal audio card, that's fine.
Then, after I fixed the converters, I want to have a good monitoring console that makes easy to route signals and prelisten from different sources. That is, since in the plan there's no all-in-one-mixing console, we need a patch bay and a control room.
A neutrik patchbay is about 50 bucks, and in case you don't use it already, it's a great solution that will allow you to never have to dig in the jungle of gear and effects cables. All is plugged in a logical way behind it, and from the front panel you can patch new connections using short jacks which are coloured and won't take over your working space.
A control room allows you to use mutliple set of speakers, to work to a standard volume setup and to a/b different sources of music for comparison. In particular, I have found (thanks Bob Katz!) that calibrating your listening enviroment to a defined max volume, which becomes your reference, it is the best way to make sure you always work at the same loudness. Normally you'll want to have the 0db and a fixed dim button (minus 10 db or even 20) as a second reference. There's a cool one on the market, not as expensive as, for example Mackie Big Knob or the Presonus Monitor Station. The very nice SPL monitor controller is slightly more expensive, but looks desirable...
Getting to the core of the whole operation: you have to choose a summing bus, which will allow you to record and mix analog, and there are millions of them out there, they are pricy and there is no point into spending all that money if you don't know how they sound.
Still, during the nights I wasted reading gear manuals, forums and websiites about this topic, I found very inspiring reading from Fletcher on Gearslutz about this Folcrom, and how to use it: more than any other solution, it seemed to me the most open to further upgrades, and the best way to make decisions based on the real sound I was interested in: basically a totally passive mixer, the folcrom has 16 in and 2 outs. Because no amplification is involved, you need to drive the stereo out into a microphone preamp to compensate the loss of signal caused by such a passive network.
Now, many of us cannot afford 16 channels of api or neve quality, but imagine being able to mix your music analog and having on the master a stereo preamp of this level, well, that is something we can manage without having to sell our furniture or get a second (third?) job.
So, I got my pre amp, found out those amazing Oldschool Audio which I started to use to process single tracks and loops, and my drum machine as well. Pricy, but large as life. It made me feel safe, because of the fact that when I decided to record an external sound or process with outboard a plugin, now I finally could do it with the best quality I could afford. But before I even thought about ordering the good looking but expensive Folcrom, I actually remembered Stewart showing me a picture of the inside of one of those boxes. Looked easy. I mean, I didn't know what a resistor ever looked like, and had no idea about how an electrical circuit works. But, maybe cause I'd just turned 30, I really feel like I MUST be able to learn new things, right?
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The Folcrom's ability to work with anything providing the makeup gain is only a plus if you happen to have high quality microphone preamps available; most small studios, and especially techno producers will most likely not have that sort of equipment.
http://www.mercenary.com/dan2buslt.html
I am fascinated by the choices you made, though. I would be interested if you could provide some short samples of audio mixed digitally and through outboard analog summing, for comparison's sake.
this was very interesting, will definately be looking into your choices here.