Lotsa extra hiss, noise, wow & flutter, reduced frequency range, and all that involved going through analog gear to tape. Why bother? You also risk the occasional playback glitch that sometimes comes during realtime monitoring that rendering avoids.

One other point i'll make is that if your intention is soley to produce redbook CDs, then i'd record and render in 44.1KHz instead of 48KHz. It's going to be 44.1KHz on the CD anyway, so rendering to 48KHz first eats up more drive space, takes more time, and then incurs another resampling step before the disc is burned.

Most of the time I've mixed through a console to utilize outboard gear, particularly verbs, and record the 2 trk mix back into Vegas. However, lately I've been experimenting with just recording the outboard gear returns into Vegas on separate tracks and then carving out the mixes completely in Vegas and rendering the final. This is obviously the better approach as only the outboard efx returns make an additional converter pass. This also allows me to automate to a certain degree (w/envelopes) the outboard efx.

drbam

All my mixing has been done by rendering, and I've never had any artifacts doing so. Playing back seems just so risky because of the potential of something happening along the linear line of audio processing. ParticuIarly at mastering time when all the tracks and plugs are cookin'. I just did a session at a reputable studio using Pro Tools and mastered down 2-track through an old vintage compressor. Great tone, great feel,...click....pip...couldn't believe it. Very small artifacts that got by me and the engineer, but enough to opt for a remaster since the track is going to be released. I would however, like to TRY a slam to tape sometime, just don't have the resources at home. I'm sure somewhere there are plugs that produce the same result as tape in some ears, but I can't afford them... As far as 24 bit/48k, I've tried that (as well as 24/96) and I simply don't hear the benefit, nor do most engineers I've worked with. In fact the only engineer I've known to do 24/48 used Paris in his studio, didn't back up anything, lost a summers worth of audio I was involved in, and lost tracks when I had him convert the remaining to move to a Pro Tools studio. (Not an indictment of anyone doing 24/48, mind you...I think 40 plus years of ganja contributed there!). Anyway, I've made equally pleasing recordings 16 bit. I default now exclusively to 24/44.

Good luck,

Larry O

I use 24/48 almost exclusively. If I need a sample rate converterto get to 44k I will use my Otari 1/4" 1/2" 2 track analog machine. For the original poster, You could just as easily render to 2 track then send to a tape machine as play realtime into it. For most mixes around here we do both render and realtime, and the results are often very different.

For the majority of my mixes, they're all done Real Time. One reason, as mentioned is the use of external hardware FX's. Another Reason is that I do most of my mixing on my digital mixing board, where when the mix is complete, I route the mix to 2 destinations, a DAT player, and routed back into Vegas. The most important thing I feel though, about doing a Mix Realtime, is making sure, "what you hear, is what you get". I came from a studio, where part of final mix process, was to make sure everything that got handed to the client was ok. So, if you made a CD, a DAT, or even a Cassette, and the client was taking that with them, you listened to that to make sure everything played back ok. There's nothing worse to lose your clients by handing them a final mix on CD, to find out later that the CD doesn't play back, or there's a glitch somewhere in the middle. So there's nothing wrong with Rendering within Vegas, to save time and then burning that mix to a CD, but you better make sure you play that CD back to make sure everything is the same as it was when you played back the final mix in Realtime. So to me, there's no time saver in rendering within Vegas, because you need to listen to it back in realtime anyways for safeties sake. I've ran into Murphy's Law quite a few times of what can go wrong will go wrong, when I was in a rush session and didn't check the final product the client was leaving with.

Even for mixes where I don't use any external hardware processing, I will run them out from Vegas, because that's the only way to ensure that they're leaving with exactly what they heard. Yes, you're possibly going through an extra D/A conversion, but the whole time you where mixing, you where mixing with that D/A conversion in your mix, unless you have ears that can monitor digital audio streams. That's also why you buy pro gear, to reduce the effects of bad D/A and A/D converstions. So I will run the mix out my soundcards digital out, to my mixing board and take the analog out of my mixing board and record that back into Vegas.

and they same "analog is random"

woo hoo

Its amazing how identical circumstances can have different results on a PC

Risen:

Hope I don't sound goofy, but, for you to be considering this method (if I read you correctly, you're going to mix in Vegas, then, without rendering, play back from the timeline and capture that to your R2R), you must have some specific goal in mind.

If you could be so kind, I'd be curious as to what you hope to gain by this. Is there some sort of tape like sound you're looking for in the final product?

I absolutely am not trying to put you down - I'm just curious why you would do it this way.

Also, could you more safely achieve your desired effect by mixing, then rendering from within Vegas, then, play the resultant file out to your R2R?

Again, just curious.

Caruso

Sure, no problem. Analog tape has a much MUCH softer ceiling than digital, that's all. So, mixing down to analog would give the song a chance to get some genuine analog "limiting" via saturation. Just worth a shot as opposed to my usual "look-ahead" peak limiter that isn't nearly as forgiving/gentle/musicial.

Yeah, render, then playback to R2R... I think that's probably just as legitimate a solution.

BTW, I use this technique in mastering, but use Steinberg's "Magneto" for this. This is a plugin specifically designed to do tape type compression, without all the side effects of tape, like the additional noise floor. I found this too be a pretty good underated plugin. I've found it to do some nice compression, without alterering the spectral content, and adding the distortion and clipping like Waves L1 type of compressors, and other mastering plugin compressors.

Red: Magneto sounds like a cool plugin. A quick google for it yields favorable reviews. Is it worth $299?

I can't say enough good stuff about Magneto. I always use it on the master stereo buss in Vegas / Acid. Plus it has enough control that you can use it for all kinds of music.

hows that antares tube warmth or whatever?