Analog summing

Analog summing causes the following effects:

  • Some noise and interference (which I’m not so interested in).
  • Different tolerances between channels and crosstalk.
  • Nonlinear output stages on individual channels.
  • Nonlinear output stages on summed channels.
  • And maybe interaction between channels.1

Without individual channel nonlinearities and such, analog summing won’t make a mix sound like it was recorded through a desk. There’s much more to a desk than just analog summing. So having analog emulation at the individual channel level is important too.1

A little bus saturation results in the warmth, clarity, and glue of classic analog recordings.2

The actual “summing” part of analog summing is perhaps not any different than digital summing.3

So it would seem all you need to do on busses to get the analog summing sound is just play with tolerance, crosstalk, and saturation.

  1. Analog Summing Demystified Part 2 – Thinking Outside the Summing Box ↩ ↩2

  2. Beginner’s Guide to Bus Processing ↩

  3. Summing Shmumming? Analog vs digital summing test - YouTube ↩

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