The solution then to this digital problem was to take individual tracks (or groups of tracks) out of the digital domain and sum them together in an analog console (or more affordably, an analog summing box like the Dangerous 2 Buss), and then take that final stereo analog signal and bring it back into the computer as your final stereo track. It is said that digital summing sounds cold, harsh, and broken. The argument goes that when you take tracks that are digital in nature and sum them together digitally, you get an inferior final mix. When digital recording and mixing was becoming a reality, people complained of the sound of the summing that was happening inside the computer. This originally all took place in the analog domain, inside a mixing console. Just like in math, when you add things together you get the sum of those parts.
This process of funneling all your tracks together is called summing.
When you record and mix many tracks together (whether on a console or in your computer) you eventually have to mix them all down through a single stereo track (your master fader) so you can print (or render) a final stereo file. The concept of summing is a simple one really. Today I want to briefly explain the issues at hand and help you to realize that you shouldn’t care. So what is summing, and why is analog supposedly better? Great questions. People say that mixing “in the box” will never sound as good as using analog summing.
There’s a big debate looming in the recording world and it revolves around analog summing.