New Music Gear Monday: Dangerous Music 2-BUS+ Summing Mixer

When it comes to outboard summing mixers, there are two distinct camps. There are the mixers who claim that a summing mixer is essential to giving their in-the-box mix that analog console sound, and there are those that claim they can do just as well without one. That said, more mixers that fall into the later camp would find a summing mixer useful if it had the ability to impart some additional color, and that’s exactly what the Dangerous Music 2-BUS+ summing mixer does.

Dangerous Music introduced the original 2-BUS back in 1999, and the new 2-BUS+ has a redesigned analog summing circuit that exceeds previous specifications. What really makes this version really different is that it now includes three innovative custom color circuits that provide an array of tonal options as well. The Harmonics control is an odd- and even-order distortion generator that runs in parallel with the unprocessed signal, and can be applied to either the entire mix or to individual channel pairs. Paralimit is an FET-style limiter that has a sound similar to that of an 1176 in the “all buttons in” mode (sometimes called Nuke or British mode). It has a blend knob and assignment buttons so it can be applied to the entire mix or just a stereo pair. X-Former is a pair of Cinemag output transformers with an exclusive core-overdrive circuit to emulate the sound of the “classic” analog consoles. These new controls allow the engineer to add new color to the mix without strapping additional outboard gear across the buss.

The 2-BUS+ has 16 input channels that connect via either XLR or D-sub connectors, switchable stereo analog insert for easy outboard gear integration, and a stepped master output gain control for exact recalls. There’s also mono switches for busses 1-2 and 9-10.

The Dangerous Music 2-BUS+ isn’t cheap at $2999, but it does offer many more features than most other summing mixers, and Dangerous Music has been in this product niche for longer than anyone. If you need your mixes to sound big and fat and can’t make them sound the way you want staying strictly in-the-box, then this is something that you should strongly consider.