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Long before the 2-BUS summing mixer turned Dangerous Music into a premium brand, the company built its reputation through transfer consoles for mastering rooms like Sterling Sound and The Hit Factory. The System Complete is the logical conclusion of that history: a full tracking and mixing setup assembled from mastering-grade components, with greater routing flexibility than a large-format desk, minus the maintenance headaches.
To understand how the System Complete works in a session, we spoke with marek stycos, President and owner of the company. "You can modify your workflow with a System Complete to how you like to do things”, he said. “Everybody I meet uses it slightly differently, and that's the point — when you're creative, you want to work in your own way, and the Complete System allows for that."
Every unit in the System Complete descends from mastering gear, which stycos considers the company's defining advantage: "Neve gave us character. SSL gave us automation and recall. But Dangerous gave us audiophilia; we captured the magic behind the mastering curtain and brought it to the recording studio". That mindset shapes the converters in particular. stycos argues that a D-to-A shouldn't impose a sound of its own, but it shouldn't be sterile either: "It can't just be flat and lifeless — that would be like removing all the bubbles from your sparkling water. You want to capture the sparkle, but you don't want to add things artificially."
Since every manufacturer draws from the same chipsets, Dangerous concentrates on the analog stages around them: high headroom, robust analog sections, and the low-pass reconstruction filtering. Color is always available but never imposed, with every color circuit sitting on a true hardwired bypass. "The fundamental basis of our existence is not to mess with your audio until you choose to do it yourself."
One of stycos's central beliefs is that the engineer's chair is also a creative one. "Engineering is just as creative as songwriting. When I’m setting up, I wear my electrical engineering hat to choose outboard, clean up noisy tracks, tune a vocal and time-align drum overheads. The creative work starts once that's finished, and I don't want anything to slow me down once that phase kicks in”. Nearly every routing feature in the System Complete exists to protect that creative flow state. It lets you reorder EQs and compressors with a single button instead of repatching them. Did you overdo the settings on your EQ? Dial the parallel control back instead of fiddling with a dozen frequency knobs. Then commit to it, says marek. "Printing terrifies people. Look at the pros — they put their patina on the session by printing things, and then they move on to the next track in the mix."
Every unit in the System Complete was designed as a standalone product that’s built to mastering standards and sold on its own merits. Assembled together, they add up to a comprehensive system that rivals an analog console. Here's what each piece brings to the table, in the order marek prefers to use them.
The signal path runs from your mic and preamp into Bus A of the LIAISON analog switcher. The LIAISON can hold six stereo or twelve mono pieces of outboard on switchable insert loops, and it's where stycos starts every session. "While the vocalist is in the booth warming up, I'm flipping through compressors to hear what might be the perfect one for her voice. I want to capture lightning in a bottle, and the first take might be the one. Artists like Lady Gaga and David Bowie tend to have a new sound on each project, so picking the right gear chain could define their entire album. Another artist may be defining their sound for a career. Figure it out fast by feeling your way“.
The CONVERT-AD+ is the unit that turns your analog signal into digital audio for your DAW. It has two stereo inputs and lets you use one at a time, dedicating the first to tracking and the second to mixing. "Instead of having an A-to-D converter with sixteen channels of average quality, we offer one great stereo A-to-D, and I can physically switch between the two inputs," says stycos.
The CONVERT-8 returns eight channels of audio from your DAW to the analog domain, sharing its clock and analog section with the CONVERT-2. Stacking two of them feeds all sixteen inputs to the summing mixer. "I'm running my outputs from arguably one of the best converters into arguably the best summing mixer," says marek. Owners of the CONVERT-8 rarely stop there — plenty of them split the eight channels into separate stereo pairs, feeding different destinations around the room. Those same eight channels can also feed a multi-channel monitoring rig if you move into Surround or Atmos work.
The 2-BUS+ receives the sixteen channels from your converters and combines them into a single stereo mix using analog circuitry. It also incorporates three color circuits — HARMONICS, PARALIMIT and XFORMER 1 — which allow you to add analog character to your signal. It's marek’s prescription for a mix that isn't lively enough; pull up some uninspiring drums or guitars and start turning color knobs until something pops.
As a cost-effective alternative to the 2-BUS+, the 2-BUS-XT has the same summing engine but in a smaller frame. The XT offers two different color circuits instead of three, assignments to channels 15-16 only, a potentiometer in place of a stepped attenuator, and no insert.
The 2-BUS+ has an external insert on its mix bus, which is a send/return that lets outboard gear sit across the stereo mix. marek connects that insert to Bus B on the LIAISON. Traditionally you’d choose one prized compressor or EQ to place permanently on the mix bus. Bus B removes that compromise because every piece of gear used on Bus A is now available at mixdown without the need to repatch. The same switching controls apply on this bus, so a single rack of outboard ends up doing the work of two.
The BAX EQ’s filters and shelves work in broad, gentle strokes, shaping the overall balance of a sound. It may be a mastering equalizer, but stycos argues that its usefulness extends far beyond mastering. He recommends tracking practically everything through it with at least one set of filters engaged — the low ones start at 12 Hz and the top ones extend to 70 kHz, so a single click removes subsonic rumble and ultrasonic content from your recordings. "The best mix engineers in the world don't call it mixing — they call it balancing, and it's far easier to balance things when tracks aren’t competing for space with material outside the audible range. The BAX EQ also has gorgeous cut filters that don’t create phase issues."
The COMPRESSOR is a stereo or dual mono unit that works by listening to the incoming signal and deciding how much to attenuate it. "The detector circuit is the brain of the compressor," marek explains. "Chris Muth spent eight months designing that section alone”.
Like the BAX, the unit is widely assumed to belong on the mix bus or in mastering, but marek sees things differently. “It's amazing that we use a Sennheiser 421 on a bass cab or toms when it was designed for speech. That's what the mic’s “S” and “M” filters stand for — “speech” and “music”. Somehow, the mic was re-directed towards drums because someone liked it that way. My point is, people think of Dangerous as a mastering company, which it is, but why wouldn't you also use the COMPRESSOR for tracking since it’s so good at it?”
The other example stycos offers is Rob Kinelski, the engineer who mixed Billie Eilish's vocal on "Bad Guy" using a 20:1 ratio on the COMPRESSOR. Closer to hard limiting than compression, it’s not a setting most engineers would arrive at on purpose. Kinelski got there by accident, and it became part of the record’s sound.
Another story is how Luca Pretolesi patched a BAX EQ into the COMPRESSOR’S detector circuit and rolled off the highs and lows so the compressor only responded to the midrange. He loved the sound so much that he called marek to order a second unit.
The CONVERT-2 is a stereo D-to-A converter that Marek uses to play the printed mix into a second input on the MONITOR-ST. This lets him A/B the analog output of the summing mixer against what actually landed in the session. And it does this with a stunning level of clarity. "A lot of people don’t realize that a D-to-A converter shouldn't have character," says stycos. "What you want is clarity and vividness. When you close your eyes, you should be able to see everything."
Mastering engineers run the same arrangement in reverse, keeping two D-to-A converters on hand and switching between them on the CONVERT-AD+'s two inputs to decide which one suits a particular song.
The MONITOR-ST is the controller that decides what reaches your speakers or headphones. It receives signals from two sources: the live output of the 2-BUS+ and the printed mix coming back through the CONVERT-2. One button switches between them.
If you need more than a stereo channel, you can add a MONITOR-SR expansion unit. Three of them bring the system up to fourteen channels for surround and immersive work.
The most practical feature of the System Complete is that it doesn’t have to arrive all at once. Every unit is a standalone product that improves your setup the day it’s installed, so the system can be assembled over time. stycos is candid about the cost involved. “Few pay for an entire rig up front”, he says. “People get it one piece at a time. That’s how we all do it, including myself”. He points to the back-end as the obvious place to start — a producer working on a standard interface can add a MONITOR-ST, CONVERT-2 or D-BOX+ to immediately improve their monitoring, clocking and conversion.
Dangerous offers the System Complete alongside other configurations like the Producer Pack and Master Complete, but stycos says plenty of customers end up with rigs that sit somewhere between the three. What stays constant is the standard each piece is built to. "If we can't build things correctly, we don’t do it at all," he says.
Ready to start assembling your own System Complete? Get in touch with an Audio Consultant to configure a system around your room, your budget, and the way you like to work.
