Old recording consoles and under-dogs

Recording consoles and under-dogs

The Sitting Room recording studios is very VERY pleased to announce a new member to it’s family.  I am unaware of anything like this in any recording studio facility in Christchurch (including our own… kidding) and would go as far to say that when we are finished with it it will be the best sounding vintage console of its type in the South Island….well, maybe.

It is none other than a baby blue TAC/AMEK 24/8/2. Designed and manufactured in England the late 70’s and 80’s this console has some VERY nice heritage associated with it. 24 channels of sowter transformer balanced mic pres’s. The mic pre amp section itself is a Langley design and that has stuck around in amek recording consoles for over 2 decades. The EQ section is a wonderfully musical sounding design that was developed further for the famous Amek 2500 and 3500 series.

This is fairly exciting news for us and took a LONG time to track something like this down. At The Sitting Room recording studios, we are firm believers of these 3 philosophies:

1. ‘Bang for Buck’
2. ‘Stand out from the crowd’
3. ‘Trust your ears’

To find something that fit across these 3 philosophies, that offered all the features we needed has taken some time, and even when we DID find it , like any beautiful old console it needs some TLC.  This is certainly not meant to read like a a young boy showing off his toys article, however please appreciate that I am pretty pumped about this, and if you take anything away from reading this be it that you don’t HAVE to spend mega mega bucks to get things that are quality and sound amazing.

‘Bang for Buck’: like our oktava modded Neumann killer mics, our modified 002 that sounds better than an apogee rosetta this new/old console fits in with this completely. The components in the build of this desk, the sound it produces, it’s history are ridiculously good for the price we paid. Sure it’s not a full discrete vintage neve but it’s also only a fraction of the fraction of the price. And no, I wont tell you how much we paid.

‘Stand out from the Crowd’: There’s such a buzz around ‘Neve’, ‘Api’, and ‘SSL’ in this industry that every man and his dog that seems to want to own a ‘professional’ studio makes them the goal. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am certainly not saying that they are no good, in fact far from it. What I am trying to say is that if everyone drove Mercedez Benz cars, then surely a vintage jaguar would just appeal to some. I have always liked finding gems in things, underdogs and being a little different from the rest and the TAC does exactly that for me.

‘Trust your ears’: need I say anymore here! Simply trust your ears, not always what you read in magazines, or blogs 

We have some plans for ‘baby blue’ (yes it’s still to be named) he’s going to get a full re-cap with caps and parts sent over from Amek in England. Not only that but like a lot of our toys plan on modifying his insides to make him sweeter and sexier. I have some plans drawn up from one of the original Amek design engineers and also plan on adding a bunch of sweet neve style output transformers… .this may not mean much to some, and nothing to others but I am excited by it. The simple fact is these days with digital recording the theory of having, owning, maintaining and using an analogue console is almost obsolete. However despite the fact that you CAN do everything digitally, there is just something so tactile and magic about playing with knobs and real faders.

Yum

Proudly and lovingly brought to you by Tim Chesney and Ben Edwards of The Sitting Room Recording Studios Christchurch, New Zealand. The south island home of audio production, sound design, mixing and location sound recording.