Recording - June 2016 - 33

transformers in their summing boxes, these
are controllable, thanks to a special circuit
designed by Chris Muth that overdrives
their cores. It's not a heavy distortion,
rather a crunchy roughing up of the sonic
edges of your mix or source.
At full bore, it is a very intense sound
that goes way over the edge; I would
never use it as such on a full mix.
Having said that, when used at a
Saturate range of 20-60%, it adds a
gritty air to the highs, and will instantly
draw a bit more attention to the previous
two processes when used in series.
I preferred X-Former with Saturate set in
the 10-30% range, where it adds an analog tightening and seating of the lows and
low mids. This constrained and gelled low
end is the part of the sound that we love
when using older classic consoles and
transformer-equipped recording gear.
In use
There are two practical ways to set up
the 2-BUS+: chaining its channels direct to
your 16 channel D to A converter, or placing it into a patchbay set up. I chose the latter and connected it to my AudioLot DB-25
patchbay. This allowed for two benefits.
First, I could quickly change my routing
scheme out of the box depending on which
channels I wanted to have mono capability
or access to Harmonics/Paralimit on their

own. Second, I could easily place outboard
equalizers and compressors into the chain,
although compressors in this scenario can
be tricky, as they are essentially post(DAW)-fader rather than true insert effects.
Hooking up the stereo insert to my usual 2bus mix chain of a Dangerous Bax EQ followed by A-Designs' new Hammer2 Tube
EQ (review forthcoming) and my A-Designs
Nail Compressor was a breeze and sounded great.
Like most engineers I used the four mono
channels for kick, snare, bass, and lead
vocal. While it's easy to lament the loss of
more mono channel choices, most engineers I spoke with agreed that those are the
four most common mono sources in a mix,
with the rest spread out to stereo busses. As
I mentioned, I often use Harmonics and
Paralimit more on individual tracks than on
the main output, especially when using my
external EQs and compressor on the insert.
Sounds like?
So how does it sound? When no processes are inserted, it offers the intangible
dimensional air and width that most of us
strive for in our otherwise digital DAW
mixes. This isn't the analog "air" we discuss
when comparing a plug-in to analog hardware; in a summing mixer like the 2-BUS+
this extra width and dimension has more to
do with headroom.

In a DAW, if you were to have all of your
tracks peaking at or around 0 dBFS (which
is common) and hit Play, those tracks would
risk clipping and your master bus would turn
into digital hash. Spreading out your tracks
into a high-headroom device like the 2BUS+ in the analog realm helps keeps the
signals open and clear. Dangerous Music
says you'll clip your D/A converters long
before you clip the 2-BUS+, and I concur.
I found my best working method to come
from adding the 3 "color" processes until
they just started to become noticeable, then
pulling them back to tuck them into the mix.
These processes will serve you best if you
build your mix with them, rather than slapping them on a finished mix. If you play
back your final mix through the 2-BUS+,
turn off the processing so it's not applied
twice!
Summing this up
I quite enjoyed the 2-BUS+; it sounds fantastic and is built with Dangerous Music's
well-known care and craftsmanship. The
firm deserves a big "bravo" for making
well-thought-out and well-implemented
improvements to a summing classic.
Price: $2999
More from: Dangerous Music,
www.dangerousmusic.com

http://www.dangerousmusic.com http://www.realtraps.com http://www.transaudiogroup.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2016