John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

I know I'm opening up a can of worms here but here goes anyway. Let's assume you have a properly built professional studio (which I don't have yet but soon). I have always mixed in the box & had simple focus rite interfaces. I do not not want or can afford a big analog console. So I guess there are 3 options for inputs into the DAW.

1) have a UAD or similar interface with line inputs and have 8-12 external preamps with some external patching for compressors and external eq's

2) just have UAD and that's it (which is basically what I have now.

3) buy a digital mixer like Allen & Heath gld it has compression da etc... Plus interface to plug into DAW


Me personally I record rock bands with live drums, but I'm assuming I have a decent room to record drums in. I want the ability to just have some eq's & compressors to do subtle processing going into the DAW. I have recorded for hire for about 10 years and am spending a lot of money to build a real building with real rooms. I would not be buying vintage preamps or expensive neve compressors. I'm talking about buying 8-$600-$1000 preamps 4-$600-1000 compressors and 4-$600-$1000 eq's That are external obviously. So my question is:

Will I hear the difference in this outboard gear or is it a subtle difference? I lean toward just buying the GLD or something similar because of functionality, but read all these posts about people loving there external gear, all the big studios have external gear. I know the external gear adds some colors but is it enough color? I also realize that different external gear is like different mics they all have there purpose. I really believe that good rooms is the key. As Ted nugget said " I could plug my guitar into a possums ass & make it sound good". I tried to give a lot of info to this post if I missed something let me know. Any opinions are good & I don't mind the bashing of my stupidity.

I guess I'm missing something in my profile? Or is this just not an interesting topic?

To my way of thinking, both ITB and OTB have their pros and cons, but as long as you have fairly decent gear then the results you can get aren't entirely dependent on spending big dollars. It's more about the musician and his instruments in the first place, then about skills in selecting the right mic for the specific setup, and placing it in the right location for that specific setup, rather than having big-name pre-amps. A tracking engineer with really good skills can make even a not-so-great mic and not-so-great pre-amp sound good. Whereas even the best mic and pre-amp in the hands of an unskilled engineer likely won't sound all that good at all.

But that's just my opinion...

- Stuart -