Recording - December 2016 - 53

combinations. This feature will greatly
speed up the workflow for mix engineers
working on recordings that weren't engineered optimally, as sometimes happens.
Mixbus is now also compatible with
some common, smaller control surfaces,
including the Behringer X-Touch, the
PreSonus Faderport, and the Mackie
Control, or indeed any device that uses
the Mackie Control Universal protocol. I
was able to test Mixbus with the
Faderport and am happy to report that it
works as advertised, even under Linux,
with minimal tweaking once it is activated from within Mixbus.
Some of the control surface functionality works slightly differently. For instance,
in PreSonus' own Studio One DAW, the
Faderport's FF and REW buttons are
activated only when held down, whereas in Mixbus, pressing FF activates the
speed increase until the REW button is
pressed to return to normal playback
speed. Pressing FF or REW more than
once progressively increases or decreases the playback speed. At present I find
this arrangement less intuitive, but perhaps it's just because I'm used to the
other function. The flip side is that it's
more powerful, since it gives you control
over several FF and REW speeds, without being limited to one.
Mixbus' outstanding new Export
Dialogue is worthy of mention. You can
get everything you want from a final mix
in multiple file formats, as well as stem or
individual track outputs, all completely
configurable with the ability to store
export presets. In fact, at first it's almost
option overload, but once you have a preset you are comfortable with, the process
speeds up drastically. You can't export
MP3 directly out of the box, probably due
to MP3 licensing issues. However, external
converters such as LAME can be configured to run on all exported WAV files from
within Mixbus, so there is a free and effective workaround.
Once you have the export options
tweaked to your taste, you are rewarded
with a treat: the Export Analysis window. This gives you a lot of information
about your export file: a waveform view
analysis with peaks, a spectrogram
waveform view, the peak level in dBFS,
the Loudness Range in LUFS and LU, a
histogram of loudness values, how much
normalization gain was applied (if you
had normalization enabled), and more.
This is very welcome, since typically the
first thing I do after exporting from other
DAWs is to open the file in a waveform
editor (e.g. WaveLab, Sound Forge,
Audition, or Audacity), to make sure
everything is as I expect it to be. This
analysis feature gives me even more
information and confidence.

Lastly, Harrison has created some
fantastic-sounding plug-ins for Mixbus (and
other DAWs), including the new XT-DC
Drum Character, XT-TG Tom Gate, and
quite a few other plugins. They all sound
quite good and I'm excited to mix with
them, but they're so many and varied that
we can't possibly cover them here.
The Mixbus 32C console
At last, we arrive at the heart of this
review: how does the 32C console
sound? The answer is: the sound of the
32C console emulation is fantastic. I find
that having the less surgical EQ speeds
up my workflow. A little tweaking on the
EQ and possibly some compression, and
the tape simulation "drive" function,
makes getting good sounds quite fast
and easy. It just sounds good-good
enough that putting up with learning a
new DAW workflow is well worth it.
I can see why a lot of people use
Mixbus as a final summing/tweaking
setup; they do all the writing, recording,
and arrangement tasks in whatever
DAW they prefer, export stems from
there, and bring them into Mixbus for
the final mix. This process works well,
and allows you to make good mixes
even better with subtle adjustments of the
wonderful EQ and compression available on the 32C console.
As you can see in Figure 2a, each
channel in Mixbus 32C has the 4-band
semi-parametric EQ, with a level knob on
the top left and frequency knob on the
bottom right of each band. There is plenty
of overlap between bands, and they interact well together-and most importantly,
they sound really good. The Q is not
adjustable but the EQ is quite effective,
and always musical, in a broad range of
applications. If I need something surgical
(such as notching out bad resonances) I
can always bring in a plug-in.
Below the 4-band EQ is the Low Pass
and High Pass filter section. You have an
on/off button for each filter, and a frequency adjustment. The Lo is on top and
the Hi on the bottom, which I find counterintuitive, although it does put the LP filter closest to the Lo band EQ.
Below the filter section are the 12
Mixbus sends: the 32C console is simply
larger than the Mixbus 3 console, which
only has 8 Mixbus sends. Each of the 12
sends has a level knob and an on/off
button, as well as a button to route the
signal directly to the master bus.
Finally (Figure 2b), we have the panpot, the label, the mute and solo buttons, a level trim, the compression controls, level and gain reduction meters,
and the master fader. All the controls for
proper gain staging (level trim, compressor threshold, etc.) are right in the
RECORDING DECEMBER 2016

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