I agree with Nick about a mixerless system, it's just seems strange not having a mixer to control the gain structure and expensive when your speakers blow. But Nick I tell u having PT HD 192IO, the output straight through to the speakers sound amazingly better than going through the DA7.

Nick

I'm sure, but I don't have an HD192, I have a MIX system. And I wasn't connecting the 888 directly to my monitors, it was going through a MOTU box.

I was half kidding. I just trust my DA7. I still mix with it using a MOTU 2408 to send 24 channels to the DA7. I'm used to the automation which has been rock solid. I work with a guy that mixes in his DAW at home while he is tracking, but he brings the tracks on disk here to do the final mixing.
I can't get used to using a mouse to mix with and unless I get a hugh monitor (I'm using a 17 flat panel now) I can't see all the channels clearly.
Jim K.

Don't you think it's funny how people will seek out old analog gear and rave obout old boards but at the same time it seems we can't wait to update our newer digital gear. Untill there is a means of delivering a product at 96 or 192 khz, I see no reason whatsoever to get rid of my 2 DA7's. With my DA7's and 2 motu 2408's, I can easily track and monitor 32 tracks at a time (I use my mac and digital performer). I have a Kit Kat commercial on T.V. right now that Andrew W. K. recorded here and we had over 50 tracks involved. Although once I get above 32 I simply group a few tracks to a stereo bus in DP and assign them to 2 tracks on the boards. I can bassically do as many tracks as my computer can handle.

A mixerless studio would be like going to a dentist and he has everything a normal dentist would have - except for a chair. "Oh, there's a new movement to do away with chairs. They're so expensive, and after all, you can just stand there and I can fix your teeth just as easily. I know it's a drag for you, but it saved me the cost of having to buy a chair!"

Hey Mark, perhaps you could go mixerless if you sold your DA7 and bought ProTools and a monitor controller (like the Martinsound).

(Man walks into the room holding a can of gasoline and says "anybody got a match?")

Perhaps we could go mixerless if we all just used two mics and pretended we were recording The Dead.
Jim K.

so mark, are you saying my mixes will sound better if i replace my old leather stool with a dentists chair? i must admit the little porcelin spit bowl might come in handy at times.

Getting serious, I don't record bands here, I record MIDI instrument outputs plus the occasional overdubbed live instrument or vox - and in fact I'm using more and more soft instruments, especially GigaStudio and EXS24. When I record live instruments, my signal path is mics/instruments -> Millennia Media channel strips -> Waves L2 (for A/D) -> DAW. Then I mix inside Pro Tools, and the DA7 is only being used for monitoring Pro Tools and MIDI instruments. (And routing, etc.)

That's why I was thinking it would be elegant just to plug everything into a MOTU system running in the background on my Mac. It would be a much larger mixer than the DA7 - up to 96 x 96, with the same "near zero" latency and a healthy range of analog and digital input options.The reality turned out to be cumbersome, as I posted, but it's certainly not a completely ludicrous idea - especially since I have a HUI, which has a good control room monitoring section built in.

I know one busy TV composer who uses exactly that setup (minus the HUI), and it works very well for him. But he doesn't swap equipment around and use lots of different software - he just runs a digital audio sequencer and uses it for everything from composing to mixing.

Now, if I were tracking bands, no way in hell would I have even considered going mixerless. It's all down to the application.

By the way, "mixerless" is really the wrong word. I still would have had a mixer - it's just that it would have been sitting on a PCI card with its I/O in rack modules.

So the chair analogy needs a filling.