Dangerous Music Sum & Minus 20th-anniversary Limited-edition  From Dangerous

The company’s mission is to solve the problems of the ‘hybrid studio’ by leveraging the best of both worlds: seamless integration of analog and digital equipment’s strengths and eliminating their weaknesses. Since product designer Chris Muth’s time has been spent almost exclusively designing custom equipment for many of the world’s preeminent mastering engineers and facilities, the combination of a mastering quality audio path with an intuitive feature set became the company’s baseline. It is worth noting that these designs evolved not in a vacuum but with input from some of the best ears in the business, refined in a working mastering environment instead of on paper. In the end, listening makes all the difference.

Born out of the shop at Dangerous Music recording studios, the equipment company was officially founded in 2001 with the commercial release of the Dangerous 2-Bus analog summing amplifier.  Dangerous Music product designs were created to answer the sonic and ergonomic challenges presented by the changing studio environment as it moved from analog consoles and analog multi-track tape recorders to hard-disk recording and software-based digital mixer/editors, collectively known as digital audio workstations, or DAWs.

The process of recording and mixing without an analog console or tape deck created the opportunity to develop products that allowed engineers to embrace all the power and convenience of a DAWs automation, editing and recall, while continuing to work as they had, with console-style tone and headroom, hardware monitor control, metering, speaker and input source switching, and the ability to insert analog processors into the signal path easily and with the highest quality results.

Company co-founder Bob Muller says, “The ideas behind Dangerous Music products are driven by the needs of the music community, who continuously finds new ways to work in the studio. Early on we concluded that once the smoke cleared it was not going to be an all-analog or all-digital studio, but a hybrid environment.  We all embrace the benefits of new technologies, but the inevitable problems that arise need to be solved. As the analog console yielded to the DAW mixer as the focal point of the control room we recognized that certain equipment was now missing that is required to actually make a studio fully functional, sonically pleasing and ergonomically sensible. When you aren’t spending all your time clicking around computer menus, you can actually concentrate on the performance, the music, and the other creative elements of what recording and mixing is supposed to be.”