Can't Decide on Mixbus

I bought it with all of their plugins. Everything sounds fantastic and their plugins are fabulous. I wish they were VSTs. They have concepts for their character plugins, the gates, etc that I have never seen and perform better with less work than anything i have ever used. Fabulous purchase. It is not geared towards a songwriter, more for an engineer and producer. I plan on using Studio One or Cubase for writing and then using Mixbus to finalize the mix. To me, it is that good.

I'm a little disillusioned with Mixbus. From their marketing blurb you'd be forgiven for thinking that Mixbus has its own sound just from running audio through it, or at least summing your tracks through its dedicated mixbuses. You will find claims everywhere that this summing is done with "analog" style magic.
 
But as Jeff Evans pointed out recently, tracks summed and exported from a "transparent" DAW will null perfectly with tracks summed and exported from Mixbus provided you don't engage any of its effects. So it's not really doing anything to the sound on its own. The Harrison sound comes instead from the Harrison effects - the inbuilt EQ and compression, the tape drive, and the various add-on effects you can purchase from Harrison. I read somewhere that the tape drive isn't even that sophisticated - it just adds some third order harmonics and engages a slight rolloff. 
 
I've heard all sorts of claims that just running a mix clean through Mixbus will give it "more depth" and a "broader stereo spread" etc. People swear they can hear it. But null tests show otherwise. Harrison mentions its "great sounding" bus summing on its site, but does it actually do anything? I read someone on the Harrison forums saying that this summing magic might be so subtle that it "still passes a null test." But come on, would it? If anything were happening at all different, they would not null. 
 
I've followed threads on the Harrison forum where someone from Harrison has chimed in, and I'm always left feeling like I still haven't learned anything solid about the Mixbus "secret sauce" and what it does. They're vague and ambiguous and don't seem willing to put their cards on the table and say "this is what Mixbus does and doesn't do." 
 
My original intent when I bought Mixbus was to do all of my mixing in Sonar and just import the stems into Mixbus for bussing and summing. But if there is no magic summing per se, that all seems pointless. I still use it, because I like the idea of switching to another DAW in the last stage of the mix. It takes away all the distractions of your original project and gives you a fresh start. Plus I like to group my tracks into busses and apply 0.5 - 1dB of compression for a little extra glue before they hit the master compressor, and sometimes I will do a little light EQ on a bus as well. So when I use the Mixbus effects for this, I'm getting some of the Harrison magic, and it does sound good. I just think that if people are buying Mixbus just for its purported summing magic, they're quite possibly being conned. 
 
 
 
 

Not many are going to use it in perfectly transparent mode and from another point of view it its great that it does offer a very perfect transparent mode too.
 
I think it sounds great though once you start getting into it and using all its built in features plus their plugs plus your own plugs too.  I love the standard EQ on the tracks and it different to the buss eq which is different again from the stereo mix eq. The 32C EQ  is really nice too on the channels.
 
The saturation is very cool also and once you get a handle on it and dialling it in, it can be very effective.  There is a very nice overall sound to this DAW.  Also you will get more of its sound too when you mix more of its sounds in it e.g. tracks.  Not stems..  Which now takes you to you might as well track in it as well.  Which you can of course.  It has more advanced midi features.  For me midi is important as I run a large external setup as well.  Always have.  Studio One is better in this department for now. Cubase and Logic better still.
 
Their plugins are very nice and have a real nice sound to them too.  Especially their mastering plugs.  I have got a fair range of them now and like them.  Reverbs and all.  I like the way the multi band mastering compressor can limit the amount of gain reduction in each band.  That makes for a very punchy and dynamic sounding mastering compressor. The way you draw eq curves in the mastering eq is something else as well.
 
Plus it is laid out like a traditional mixer/multitrack tape machine layout which some may prefer and even love.  I taught sound engineering on a Harrison console for a few years so I feel at home with it.  The metering is good as well.  Plus the channel dynamics processors, every channel having dynamic control at your fingertips. 

$79 is incredible for a pro-level DAW that seems to get good reviews everywhere, but $29 was like a sore p**ker (you just can't beat it), so I pulled the trigger.

Who cares if it has any magic voodoo or not. Digital audio is digital audio. Just playing with it last night, it looks like it will be real simple to operate. The fact that it has EQ and compression on every channel (not to mention the price!) is what sold me; that's what attracted me to SONAR's ProChannel so much.