Front Panel and Use
There are two types of front panel controls on 2Bus LT.
MONO
switches put the signals of a pair, normally panned hard left and right, up
the middle of a mix.
The
Output Level Trim
is a mix fine gain adjustment used to get the signal level
just right to the mixdown A/D converter (or EQ/Compressor if in the chain).
The switches on the front panel are laid out so that the inputs can be treated as stereo
pairs, also known as “stems” or as individual inputs panned up the middle of a mix. For
sounds that are panned somewhere in between the two extremes, a pair of D/A converters
is used and the Mono button is not engaged.
For example, let’s say that one wants to mix a drum kit with bass, guitars, a lead
vocal, and reverb signals together. To keep things simple, let’s say that the engineer has a
DAW with 8 D/A channels available to patch to analog output processing if desired and
then, the 2Bus LT. This mix has 8 tracks of drums, one bass, two guitars, one vocal, with
reverb and effects for maybe 2 dozen tracks total. Usually, a DAW user would mix this to
2 tracks and then bounce the result to a new pair of tracks, but by using 4 pairs of outputs,
audio flexibility can be improved by assigning the drums to DAW outputs 1 and 2, the
bass and vocal to 3 and 4, the guitars to 5 and 6, and finally, the effects returns to 7 and 8.
The bass and vocal want their own channels so they are assigned straight to the outputs
with no panners and the
MONO
button on the 2Bus LT is pressed to pan them up the
middle. The 2Bus LT Main Output is then sent to an A/D converter that is recording back
into the DAW or an external device like an editing system, tape machine, or CD burner
using the Output Trim Level to set the gain precisely. Since the tracks are spread among
several busses in the computer, the individual levels can be run much hotter ‘inside the
box’ resulting in a mix that has better clarity, detail, and punch. The use of outboard
processing means that individual stems can be made to slam without using ‘outboard
loops’ in the DAW and suffering another A/D conversion with the inherent time delay
issues and another digital fader with its loss of detail. This example is a bare bones mix.
The effect of setting a system up like this becomes more apparent as more tracks have to
be mixed. The 2Bus LT, 2Bus, and Mixer are stackable to accommodate systems of any
size.
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