Rupert Neve Designs 5059 Satellite 16x2+2 Summing Mixer - Shelford

There is no question that analogue summing in the 5059 is superior to digital summing in pro tools. The 5059 sounds warmer, punchy, and natural. I found that when summing in the box with pro tools I have to mess with levels all the time “ride the faders” . With the 5059, multiple mics on a guitar for example just seem to naturally meld into a unified signal where as summing in pro tools, these same tracks never sound quite right, almost like they are competing like bickering children.

Functionally, controls are solid, pan features are odd at first but now I love them. Having silk is great. Inserts work very well as does having second stereo output.

Overall an outstanding unit and indeed is the perfect analogue starting point going into MBP and/or MBT, MBC.

I own a hybrid studio with a healthy amount of offboard gear (2xDistressors, an SPL IRON on the mix buss, shelford channel, tube preamps, 2xRND 542's, SPL Big, etc...). If I had the money, my mixes would be run through a 96 channel 5088 loaded with shelford channels and a fully stocked meter bridge (have you heard that before?). Alas, like the rest of us in the in the real music world, I started looking at cheaper options such as the 5059. I should state up front I have never mixed on a Neve board and have always had a hybrid setup, but I have explored sonic palettes as matter of soul searching for years to arrive at the conclusion that the RND analog sound without the hassle of tape among other things was the end state goal for my sound. After some research and overhearing some conversations (third party) from engineers at RND the decisive point for me came in the form of floating point computations in the 5059 vice the 5057 orbit. So, after scouring the youtube “universe” and the gearhead blogs with the "sounds badass" platitudes I came upon enough evidence that this unit would make the difference to the extent of the sound I was looking for. As an aside, several months ago I invested in a pair of RND 542's (after going through a similar due diligence process) and found a stunning sound color that suits my tastes perfectly. This is what got me started on looking seriously at getting the "analog sound” and those units now take permanent residence downstream of my Shelford channel for tracking. Although the 5059 is not exactly the same thing (not a tape emulator per se), the general color imparted by the Neve analog "tapeish" sound brought an eyes closed smile to my face sitting in the mix position….

If you know what I’m referring to and have the resources then read no further and get on it, you're wasting time. This is it and for the cost you won’t beat it. No shit.

If you scour the internet there is scant quantitative discussions about the effects of analog summing and you will instead find emotionally charged material on whether it is worth it or not. Before you can understand its worth you have to understand what it will provide. To provide (IMHO) a better description of its effects without actually posting my mixes I will describe my first full day (and a sleep to think) with this unit and my opinions. I am a life long musician turned into sound engineer in my own professional grade studio in the last ten years having been taught by a grammy nominated studio owner who remains my drummer and mastering engineer to this day.

I spent about a 30 min calibrating each pot on the 5059 using a 0 db tone signal at 1K, with the master outputs on the 5059 at 0 and turning each of the 16 pots to get a -6 db signal in the DAW from the 5059. Ill probably end up going lower than -6 in order to give my mastering engineer more headroom for his trade.

Then, I took an advanced mix I have been working on and restructured the I/O in the mix to feed stereo stems into the 5059 and then print the stereo mix back to my mix buss where I had an offboard Hardware SPL IRON on the buss. First learning point is that was not a simple task. Trying to integrate offboard gear into a DAW is usually a simple I/O plugin to route an output to whatever hardware you’re using then back into the DAW. You will need to structure your entire mix in a way that it can be fed into the 5059. Therefore, I setup my I/O so that I had 8 stereo busses being fed into the unit. Mine looked something like:

1/2 DRUMS
3/4 ACOUSTIC GUITARS
5/6 STRINGS/PIANO/ORCHESTRAL
7/8 RHYTHYM ELEC GUITARS
9/10 SFX
11/12 BASS
13/14 VOX
15/16 SOLO/LEAD GUITARS

The devil is in the details of doing this if you're mixing. First and foremost, if you're gonna use a summer then you must hear it to mix while using it. E.g. you need to have that setup on the 5059 and in your DAW in such a way that you can execute your normal DAW workflow while simultaneously feeding that to the 5059 and then back into your DAW to hear the effects. I had to change a few fundamental things in my DAW setup to be able to monitor the mix while still being able to do basic things like level changes, plugins and a lot of the other normal mix tasks you may have purely in the DAW. Don't scoff this, you will need to spend some time accommodating this modified I/O and work flow. I have been using LPX with an Avid interface for many years and I spent about an hour adjusting the settings on EUCON to accommodate a slightly altered way of doing things in order to have the stems going to the 5059 and back into the mix realtime to hear what I was doing.

After completing what I felt was a good mix, I printed it (I had about 30% red silk on it from the start) and ended up turning my master output knob on the 5059 down a touch to give my mastering engineer some headroom (and avoid the inevitable bitching about it). I also had the SPL iron on that print for mostly glue (less than 2-2.5 db GR in the VU).

I then took that exact same mix and removed the 5059 entirely from the I/O and printed everything to a mix buss using digital summing using precisely the same SPL IROM settings on the mix buss.

First thing I learned was I had to hard pan the knobs on the 5059 for each stereo stem in order to reflect the pans I had in my DAW mix. Specifically, elements that I had panned +/- 35 in my DAW mix were summed to center in my stereo return from the unit. So, for example on the DRUM stereo stem on fed into 5059 channels 1 and 2, I had to hard pan ch1 to the left and ch2 to the right in order to hear the correct placement of the drum kit that I have always used in my DAW. I felt kinda dirty changing all my pans on the 5059 to hard left and right but the results were true to what I had in LPX (and stunningly so). I actually slept on this thinking about it after doing my first AB to the digital sum thinking “crap, the sound is great but everything is in the center, there is no width…”

Once I figured that out, all of the platitudes that you will read on the internet about analog summing rang true for my ears and it was exactly what I was looking for. The 5059 mix had a fatter bottom end (not louder, just "thicker") and a much more rounded top end. When you hear people on the internet talking about the analog sound this is partly what they are talking about.

More poignantly, the sounds HAVE MORE SPACE between them and are more crystalline. So.....when I first started looking into this stuff years ago I figured it was mostly hype. I can give you a specific example of how that manifested itself in my mix. I have about 10 voices in a gregorian like chant on my song and those voices in the 5059 mix sounded more "individual." I could pick out specific sounds segregated quite clearly in the 5059 mix vice the digital sum mix. The digital mix seemed to blend everything together as it was timed in each track mathematically perfectly (truly) as opposed to the analog mix where Transformer Like Amplifiers imparted a dynamic where the ebb and flow of the sounds had some inertia in them that segregated the perfect digital sum into hills and valleys in a way that is musical with the flow and feeling of the song. That's how I describe the crystalline quality of the analog summed mix. I can hear details of each stem and within each stem vice the blending of the sound that came with the digital mix in a busy spot. If you want something simple to listen to in a mix to AB analog versus digital, listen to your drum kit. I can hear the individual hits on various parts of the kit cleanly compared to the digital sum. That’s half the battle with critical listening – knowing where to focus your ears when listening to a mix print.

So, a fairly apples to apples comparison of the mixes showed the 5059 to provide all of those buzz words you read online. A fatter or thicker bottom end, a rounded top end with no harshness and a clarity of tracks that you just cannot get anywhere else (my opinion). The people that came up with the terms "digital harshness" were no doubt talking about this comparison. But that doesnt necessarily make it right depending on your tastes as a sound engineer.

If you're buying this because someone convinced you digital summing is imperfect, or is sub-par, you are flat wrong. To be blunt, this isnt the panacea to a crappy mix. This type of thing will only make your mixing MORE difficult if you're used to doing everything in the box. Your mix process in the hybrid world is NOT the same as it is in the purely digital. That said, if you understand the sounds you want to hear and further understand WHY this unit gives you the sound it does then you will find a sonic nirvana that makes the additional effort worth it. There is no “analog is better than digital,” or vice versa, just what you as the artist and creator want to hear at the end of your work. For me, this summing unit makes a significant difference in my perceived quality of the sound. Well done RND, I am a fan.

cheers
Erik
Guitarmusica.com