That's the problem.. I watched a clip of Sylvia Massy talking about this nice little Mackie mixer they had available to them that made their drums pop in this little studio..wow they sound great!! But they also had a bunch of Neve preamps rack mounted and some WARM audio stuff. So yeah, it sounded like the Mackie was used for summing and sending the drums to board but the heavy sonic listening was the neves and WARM audio with the Mackie providing the cohesive glue/stereo spread. It sounds more and more to me like all these producers are using their consoles for summing. Set to unity gain and ITB stems out through the mixer. In cases where they have an SSL board, they might use the EQ but for recall, they literally just sum through these 20-30K consoles and throw outboard compression on a buss here or there. So these old boards have the advantage of being cheap for small demos and projects and summing really. It's interesting. A lot of consoles stick around because you walk into the studio and are like damn! So cool! Legit studio here. But look to the right and left of that console of all the racks and 500 series racks with external mic pre, eq, and compressors.
Which is good, that enables one to use neve dbx 160a etc etc which does color in their own awesome way.
