What I actually see, as mentionned by other people, that if you play in the red it is easier to keep a constant volume. It won’t matter if you play one or two tracks at once, as you already hit 100% volume with one track. During the whole transition the volume will probably remain more or less constant. But due to this compressing (?) you will loose the dynamics.
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i’d agree with this take.
it’s also worth mentioning that depending on the mixer, anything “in the red” stands a pretty good chance of outputting distorted. the effects of that distortion depend greatly on whatever’s next in the signal chain (maybe a compressor/limiter, maybe a crossover, maybe straight to the amplifiers).
i really try and stay out of the red and maybe pop into it now and again if peaking (and then back off a bit) - i assume the worst and that either the live sound or the recording is gonna be blown out.
Pioneer mixers going into the red will digitally clip, it’s just a matter of how high you go before it happens (remember the metering stops at a certain point but you could theoretically surpass that point by a fair amount). On A&H mixers which are analog it will induce distortion which is a bit different, but also not great.
The reason mixers like Condessas, Ureis and Bozaks have a “sweet spot” around 7 is because that’s where you get unity gain. They aren’t meant to have trim knobs, and so 7 is really where you should be stopping, whereas over that is “headroom” to compensate for lower mixed tracks - an album cut vs a 12 single, for instance.
I can pretty much guarantee any time a DJ is going into the red without it sounding like it there is a mild-to-wildly pissed off sound engineer working a board making sure it doesn’t sound like shit.
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I think I read that they used the extra space, that omitting the crossfader gave them, to give the upfaders a longer range, which tbh is a lot more useful than a crossfader, for the type of mixing you probably do on a V10LF.
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Something else you ought to ask yourself: how many of the DJ’s you see playing into the red do you think took time to do a soundcheck of the venue prior to playing? (Assuming it was possible, which is often the case…)
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