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• Review

The rackmounted summing mixer has recently become the premier means of getting your in-the-box mix out of the box for some wholesome analogue conditioning before it goes back into the box.

Thermionic Culture responded to this trend with typical aplomb by issuing the impressive Fat Bustard.

To expand that unit's 12 channels (via the Aux 1 & 2 inputs) TC has created the Little Bustard, a 16-channel summing mixer which keeps to the house speciality (valve amplification only) in a 2U casing.

Unlike the Fat Bustard, this unit doesn't feature any signal processing (EQ, distortion/attitude, stereo expansion) and offers the user six fixed gain stereo channels, four mono channels with Gain/Pan controls and independent left and right Master Level knobs.

Why Analogue Summing?

"A peek at the Bustard's innards reveals the hand-wired beauty that comes as standard with TC gear."

The rise of 'in-the-box' mixing has still left a lot of engineers cold, with poor stereo imaging and loss of clarity/depth cited as problem areas. Though it has been argued that a lot of this is subjective, there are real causes for poor summing in the digital realm, such as large track counts generating massive calculations that challenge CPUs/DSP chips (which are also running plug-ins and hard drives) and even high bit-depth internal processing.

These problems can be program-dependent and digital mixing can be extremely accurate when treated right; even so, analogue summing is free from these problems and offers some added benefits.

The infinite degree of variation in voltage/current means that analogue mixing can achieve an extremely fine degree of clarity and articulation. The earliest mixing consoles were basically summing mixers, but these soon became loaded with EQs, routing options and dynamics that brought a myriad of noisy components that mostly degraded the mix.

And so it is that we return to the trusty summing mixer to get the best of analogue and skip all those bits we already have in our shiny new DAWs.

Chicken heads

The I/O is via XLRs at the rear (16 input, two output) and operates entirely unbalanced, thus forgoing any colouration or noise contributed by balancing transformers, op amps or transistors (the Fat Bustard, like many TC units, is also unbalanced).

The gloss black front panel carries the Thermionic design aesthetic, from the big green power light to the chicken head knobs. At the left are the six stereo channel on/off switches.

In the middle are the four mono channels with their individual Gain controls (from ∞ to 0dB/unity), on/off switch, Pan knob and Pan 'In' switch. When set to 'Mono' mode, as opposed to 'Pan In', this latter switch adds 6dB - more on this below.

To the right of the mono channels are the two Master Level knobs, which range from -18dB to +2dB. At the far right of the facia is the Bustard's face, the eyes of which house the output level indicators. Two small amber LEDs indicate 'signal present' while larger, multi-coloured LEDs use a traffic light system to show how hard the output is being driven.

Thanks to the well-laid-out front panel, the Little Bustard is easy to use and feels reassuringly solid. All of the control pots are indented: 21 positions for the mono channel gain and Pan pots and 31 positions for the two master levels.

This is particularly useful for matching levels between channels and the master outputs, as well as for Pan position setting - the 'one click up/one click down' routine makes life a lot easier, compared to nudging a pot back and forth.

The quality on the outside is matched by that of the inside, as having a peek at the Little Bustard's innards reveals the hand-wired beauty that comes as standard with TC gear.