Operational Manual Overview – The Benefits of Analogue Summing
OVERVIEW – THE BENEFITS OF ANALOGUE SUMMING
Having bought the unit, you’ve probably figured out that Sumo is a
In essence, Sumo takes a bunch of signals from several inputs and adds or “sums” them together to present them to one output. This is exactly the same process as takes place in mixing consoles – the mix bus sums signals from all of the channels together.
“But my software has a mixer. Why can’t I just use that?” I hear you cry. Digital summing has one crucial problem; that the output bit depth is equal to or less than each of the internal signals. This means that when signals are summed, some data must be thrown away. Moreover the volume of data discarded in this process increases with your track count. It would, of course be unfair to suggest that modern software performs this data reduction indiscriminately or with especially poor results, however many engineers and producers have found there to be something lacking in their digital mixes – often employing an analogue console purely to make use of its summing bus.
So what’s so special about the mix bus on a big console? Well… only the highest of high end, large format consoles employ balanced mix buses to reduce crosstalk and fend off noise. And this is precisely the kind of mix bus you’ll find in your Sumo, delivering the sound of a large format console without the huge footprint, or price tag.
Not only is Sumo’s summing bus as clean as a whistle, it has frighteningly high headroom. This is particularly important because adding signals means adding their levels, too. The more signals you add, the more level you’re likely to find on the sum bus. Consequently, Sumo has been designed to handle levels in excess of +28dBu.
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