Last summer, after a year of VCC use, I got my first analog console. I got it on a trade, an Audio Technica AT4050 for this killer Panasonic Ramsa.

I figured it’d be something I could expand into, because I didn’t have the I/O for more than 6 channels. Closing ones studio to be a caregiver, and moving into a home studio, one doesn’t need a lot of I/O for personal projects these days. Meanwhile, I figured I’d use it for character & saturation, and the 3 band eq reminded me of a Neve 1073 (due to the curve shapes).

Never having worked in the analog world, every time I tried to use it I felt I was wasting time. Routing audio out, then back in, then printing in real time, it was just too slow. Forget recall. What recall?!

Meanwhile, I was still using vcc all over my mixes. Coupled with the many analog modeled eq plugs I have, I was never hurting for what I wanted from the analog sound. After the virtual preamps dropped, forget about it.

My Ramsa console eventually became only something I recorded my voice through for my videos. 24 channels so I could use 1 on occasion? Meanwhile, look how far back my screen was. It’s hard to read at that distance. Some plugins, like those from Metric Halo, have adjustable GUI sizes. That’s a good thing in situations like this, as I could always just make the GUI bigger. But most don’t have this feature, and I found myself using a zoom command on my iMac to zoom in so I could read parameters all the time. I even contemplated using a lower resolution on my screen at one point, but that would cost me real estate on my 27″ screen.

There were to many costs associated with the console. High cost of adding I/O so i could actually use all the channels, the cost of space that was lost on my desk, the cost of seeing my screen with ease, the cost of time when printing through the console…

So last night I decided to try my desk with the console gone. More comfortable, less crowded, and I’m not missing something I wasn’t using anyway.

Probably gonna finish my q-clone profiles of the console before listing it for sale later. It doesn’t make sense for how I work, mostly because I have vcc and now the everything bundle. Who needs real time? Didn’t we leave that with pro tools 9? Lol!