Yet another summing mixer...

SM Pro Audio is gonna drop the PM8 summing buss at NAMM. I thought we would start to see more low-cost summing mixers now that everyone realizes that DAWs can’t sum for shit. And lo, and furthermore hark, here we have one. No price yet, but I can’t see how it will be very much, as SM Pro is not a high-end company.

There are some questions, though. It says “passive” (which is what the “P” in “PM8” stands for.) That would imply that it was like the Folcrum or something, entirely passive, and you need to provide make-up gain via mic pres. However, it also plugs in; the Folcrum doesn’t need any electricity because, well, it’s passive. So, I think that the summing buss itself is passive, while there are line amps for makeup gain. Thus, the potential for shitty sound exists. We’ll see, of course, but if this thing is any good at all, I’ll guarantee that it’s gonna be an excellent deal.

**
UPDATE:** I wrote to SMP, and they wrote back the following: The Master Outputs do have a MAKE-UP gain stage to eliminate the loss of the input attenuation. So there’s some potential for nastiness there, but it makes it a lot easier to deal with than having to use mic pres.

UPDATE 2: In response to my second query, they just wrote to tell me the MSRP is $399. Wow. They’re gonna sell a quadjillion of these things.