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The inline mixing console......What is it?

There are essentially two different sources of sound in a typical recording studio. One obviously from the artist or source you are recording, and the other from the track which was already recorded on your digital audio workstation (DAW).
Plan B

You want to be able to listen to, as a recording engineer, to both these sources on your loudspeakers in the control room.

Inline mixers are a specially configured type of mixer that are able to monitor ‘multitrack’ tape returns using the same channels that were used to connect line ins and microphones, I.e. the two different sources we saw earlier. This would be in opposition to the other type of mixers known as ‘split mixers’ which difference is that they have separate inputs dedicated to returns and sends. Since the inline mixer basically does a two in one job, they have the advantage of beings smaller and comparatively cheaper. It would just generally have a few more knobs and switches on each channel strip than the split mixer.



To explain it further, let’s take channel strip 1 for example. The input source will take the signal from the microphone placed in the recording room and all other channel strips will follow the same for their respective inputs. Channel strip 1 will also have a path from the monitor of itself from the multitrack recording DAW which is a totally different signal path. There will be two controls in this channel strip, one for the input path and another for the monitor part. The first control will handle the signal going into the actual multitrack and the second one will control the level that we hear of the track already been recorded.

The only thing that gets a bit confusing is that each individual channel strip has a ‘bus trim’ out control. This is basically what you would find as a group output on a split console. This control helps control output of a group so you would have overall control over all the inputs sent to that particular group. Say for example you were recording drums, you could then route all the, probably 8 microphones, of the drum kit to that group through this feature. Say if you were to route these 8 microphones to group 10, it would be track 10 on the multitrack, the bus trim feature would control the signal going into the multitrack would be on channel strip 10 on your mixer. When you wanna play it back you can hear it from the monitor path in channel strip 10.

This is a bit of a confusing topic, but to make it professionally in broadcast or recording, you would have to be a master in the concept of the inline mixing console!


References

An inline mixing console. What's that?. (David Mellor). Retrieved April 6, 2006,from https://www.audiomasterclass.com/newsletter/an-inline-mixing-console-what-s-that

In Line Mixer. (Sweetwater). Retrieved February 27, 2004, from https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/line-mixer/


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