After some drama with FedEx ground, I finally got a nice big box from Vintage King, the which held a new piece of Shiny. Witness the raw power and beauty of the ultimate home DAW monitor controller. And summing box. And control room master.

I've only just got it hooked up and such, but my initial impressions are quite good. Build quality is, of course, top notch, because it's Dangerous, after all. The summing buss is, as far as I can tell, indistinguishable from the one inside the Mytek. (Both are audibly better than the Cubase one, and I don't even need to go in to Live's internal summing, of course.) I took the internal Mytek one and put it in Analog Input, and the dsub analog output and put it in the summing input, and flipping back and forth I can't tell the difference once I volume-matched them.

Anyhow, since it might be interesting to those of you that don't do external summing but are considering it, here's a little chart of how I have my system hooked up now:

It may look fairly complex on the surface, but it's actually pretty simple.

1. The Mytek gets digital out 1-8 via AES from the AES16 card. It turns that in to analog 1-8 (four stereo busses) that are sent to the summing input of the D-Box.

2. The D-Box sums the four stereo busses, and poops a stereo mix out its "summing output." This is sent back to analog inputs 7 and 8 of the Mytek.

3. The Mytek sends these signals down 7 and 8 of its digital output back to the AES16. This is the post-summing mix I need to record when I'm done mixing. Until that point, I just listen to the summing right at the D-Box, which also can send that signal to the speakers.

4. Analog inputs 1-6 of the Mytek come from my 6-space 500-series lunchbox, nominally full of mic pres. (Only two slots are occupied at present.)

5. Digital out 15 and 16 come from the AES straight to the D-Box's digital input. This allows me to monitor the post-summing signal; I also can use this as my main system output, bypassing the Mytek entirely. The button on the D-Box is conveniently labelled "DAW."

6. The Eclipse is hooked up to digital I/O 9 and 10 via AES, directly to the AES16.

I still have two more stereo AES/EBU heads on the second AES16 snake (as well as the unused 15/16 input.) I could use these to add, just as a for-instance, a PCM 81 and PCM 91 or whatever. Also, once I purchase a buss compressor, that will go between the summing output of the D-Box and analog input 7/8 of the Mytek, obviously.

This is a fairly standard rig for external summing with an 8-channel A/D/A, as such things go. Now to go buy a couple cans of black powder to give this Central Station the send-off it so richly deserves.