What's the best way to use outboard gear while mixing in the computer?

[stringyo]

I've always been curious about this...

These days it seems that many home/medium sized studios are dropping their consoles all together and "mixing in the box" using just plug-ins for dynamics, EQ, reverb, etc.

What would be the best way to use outboard gear? Let's say that you track all your drums dry, and then during mixdown you want to throw a compressor on the kicks and snare...how would this be done? Route the drum track to an output on your interface, then to the comp, then back in to the interface on another input, then re-record that input? This seems like a very illogical process to me...not to mention the D/A/D conversion to get to an analog compressor and back.

Am I just not understanding the signal flow of these console-less studios? Does anybody mixdown with consoles and DATs anymore?

 

[greyskull]

in the studio i work in we have a couple of tasty out board compressers.

namely 2 thermionic culture phoenix , and 2 UA 1176.

For stuff that needs compressing, we normally do it before it hits the daw, we normally put the snare throught the line driver of the 1176. And whatever else we feel like on the day through the phoenix.for drums. Vocals we normally run through both. It sounds killer.

basically the trick when compressing before going into your d.a.w is to not go crazy, coz you can add more compression later either by plug in, or routing the signal back out and in again... But you cant you cant take it off if you over do it.

When mixing down, we normally run the mix out of tools and into the phoenix, for a bit of master compression and back in whilst bouncing to disk. we also take advantage of the apogee's soft limit while we're at it.

we do have two allen and heath saber series (carcass anyone?) in the studio , but its very rare they get used. mixing in the box when you have a decent control surface is so much easier!

 

[stringyo]

About a half hour after typing up this post, I found a thread over at gearslutz.com that specifically addressed my question.

It seems that there are programs that have plug-ins that act as insert points (like on a console) where you select a hardware output and another hardware input and the signal comes right back in on the same track.

My programs don't have this. If they did, I wouldn't have asked such a stupid question.

1176 huh? Oh, what I would give to have one of those or two LA-2As.