How It Started

This project was first conceived just after I finished building my first piece of DIY audio equipment, an SSL 4000 bus compressor clone. I was thinking about what I wanted to build next, and although there is a massive range of DIY projects available, I found myself wanting some features that I couldn't currently find anywhere.

At the time I had been playing around with the amazing Slate Digital VCC and listening to some blind comparisons of different DAW and analog mixes, and I guess I was greedy and wanted to build something perfectly suited to my situation (but who wouldn't?). From the blind comparisons it was clear that all the analog mixes sounded better than the digital versions, so the obvious thing to do was build a summing box that could give the big analog sound to a small project studio.

But then you are stuck with the choice. Solid state or tube? Fast and clean or dark and grungy? But why stick to one sound, after all you don't use the same preamp on every instrument. So there it was: I wanted to build a summing box in which you could submix to a choice different flavour of mix amps. Each bus would have inserts so that you can put a compressor over just the drum bus or whatever you wanted to try.

I wanted to include a decent monitor controller as well, with separate mix/monitor outputs so that you didn't have to go through the AD/DA before listening to the mix.

My SSL bus comp with controversial perspex front panel. After building this some people said that perspex isn't such a good material for a front panel, as it won't block EMI/RF, which is true. Now that I have more knowledge on the matter I probably wouldn't do it again, but I haven't experienced any interference problems yet. You're always learning how to improve these things.

Elliott