BIG NEWS: Harrison Joins Solid State Logic

[Stephan S]

Who will handle well, the surrenderer or the shark?

[Ben@Harrison]

Lots of good points raised here.

As of last week, I am no longer an owner but just an employee; so I can't guarantee anything. All I can promise is that I will try to maintain our commitments to cross-platform, personalized support, and other values that we have created with Mixbus. During the purchase process, we had to prove that Mixbus was GPL compliant and was a viable commercial product.  Every indication is that they know what they bought and they want to continue it.

Audiotonix has a history of improving brands, not hurting them...  SSL itself is a great example.  They are a much more innovative company now, than 5 years ago.  I'm very jealous of their new developments like the small control-surfaces.

Comparisons to Soundscape don't make sense, in my opinion. SSL bought Sydec for their I/O boxes. By many accounts, Soundscape was an excellent DAW with a very smart featureset(*), but it didn't have nearly the width or depth of features as Mixbus. Furthermore it was windows-only, and at the end of the day it didn't have very many users.  It has always been my opinion that  a DAW's value increases exponentially as the number of users increase.  Soundscape didn't have the platform or staff or breadth of features to support growth, but Mixbus does.

(*)  the Audition action is borrowed directly from Soundscape, by the way

[chaocrator]

Personally I'm a huge linux fan and user.  On the other hand, for my 'real' audio tasks I use a mac.

using Mixbus on (Intel-based) Mac Mini running Ubuntu. 
Mixbus was the 1st commercial audio software I ever bought. 
hope i won't have to reboot to Mac OS, because I'm too lazy to do it 

[madmaxmiller]

I am hoping for some new hardware that peeps can afford

Hmmmm SSL are not known for moderately priced hardware 

MMM

[johne53]

During the purchase process, we had to prove that Mixbus was GPL compliant and was a viable commercial product

Over the years, SSL has been involved with countless DAW's both closed source and open source (including Ardour, at one point...) but it's a technology that's always somehow eluded them. They supported DAR's SoundStation at one point, plus Soundscape and of course their own attempts, including ScreenSound, Scenaria and Omnimix. But credibility in the DAW market has never (quite) come within their grasp. Maybe one of their hopes is that if they combine the best bits of Soundscape and Mixbus, it'll finally deliver the commercially successful DAW they've always craved?

Only time will tell, I guess...

[SaraFarrell]

Great news

[Casey Pittman]

Maybe now HUI support can be added. Lots of people still use HUI and not having it in mixbus is the main reason I don’t fully adopt it. Kills my work flow. Still support it with my money though. Willingly paying for something I can’t use, feels more like donating to a charity.

Casey

[Scardanelli]

Congratulations! I'm sure much hangs in the air, and the Mixbus team are as apprehensive as they are excited.

But with a major player like SSL, and some of the other brands in the house, I for one believe that Mixbus will no longer be able to ignore Atmos....

Here's hoping!

[Studio Saturn]

I'm I the only one kind of feel happy about it? I believe we will have two of the most legendary Desks in our disposal. If SSL Bring their console into DAW what else do we really need
? the only reason I'm adding extra plugin into Harrison is because of not having adjustable Q value. Now that SSL has joined my wish will come true sooner rather than later with another flavor Desk.
Congrats SSL and Harrison. SSL is another Brand that I love and use into my mix.

[jjw]

Interesting, I was looking at possibly getting one of those SSL audio interfaces for home recording! So, as long as folks are posting requests for new products, how about this idea: Harrison/SSL Portastudio?

An SSL/Harrison multitrack recorder & mixer similar to the Tascam Model 12 with great mic pres, monitoring, lots of channels, and physical controls, so that I can take the board to different recording locations and record stems to an SD card all on the board without a laptop, and then take the board back home and plug it into my computer and, bam, all my recorded tracks and physical controls are seamlessly integrated with Harrison Mixbus, with any track that has multiple takes imported all stacked up and ready to go. A better quality highly usable device allowing me to multitrack record and monitor without a computer would bring me so much happiness. And, if it can double as a mixer for live shows, yes please, this would be my favorite machine in the world. The only options available in this realm currently are Tascam (Model 12 etc) and Zoom (LiveTrak etc) products. And, nobody has ever said, "this music would sound better if we had recorded it on a Zoom," so there's some real possibility there. Like, I could see people being more likely to brag about, "yeah, we recorded this on a Harrison/SSL Portastudio; doesn't it sound amazing?"

I don't know what the market is for such a thing, or if the tech would be feasible to build or sell, but if we're naming pies in the sky for this new partnership, then that would be the ideal, from my perspective as someone who is first into playing music and secondarily into home recording. Obviously I am not a professional or anything! It just seems like this new company has so many levels, now, of mixers, audio interfaces, software, etc, why not combine a mixer with nice intuitive physical controls and flexible monitoring options with the DACs and decent mic pres in the affordable SSL audio interfaces, and add a little processor and SD card slot to record 24 bit wav files. I assume there are plenty of reasons why it would not be worth doing, but dumb ideas is what internet forums are for!

Also, congrats on the sale of the company and best of luck. I look forward to continuing to happily use Harrison Mixbus (with tracks recorded on my uninspiring Zoom, lol!)