All rights reserved.
Copyright Bavo Dekker (c)1998
Abbey Road / EMI studios
Most notable for their in-house equipment were Abbey Road / EMI.
'We had a manufacturing center upstairs and all the RS60s, limiters
and things, they were made there,' explains Ken Townsend. 'We later
made those into cutting rooms, when we formed a thing called REDD,
which was Record Engineering Development Division [based in Hayes],
which started making the REDD equipment--the
REDD 1 was the first sort of stereo gear. 'The
REDD 17 used 40dB (V72s) amplifiers made in Germany--to my
knowledge, that was the first ever recording console, rather than
a sort of a box. It had eight inputs and two auxiliaries. You had
sum and difference transformers on Channels 1&2 and 7&8, and at the
next stage you could plug in either pop or classical EQ.'
click image for more on Redd 37
'One of the big things that we got going was the echo chamber,' continues
Stuart Eltham, who began his time with EMI's Abbey Road in 1948, 'and
it took quite a time persuading the research department that we needed
a mixer--they thought you could just put echo on everything. We had
to try and explain to them that you needed more echo on violins and
voices, and you didn't need any on the drums... Which means you wanted
to select which microphone circuits you were going to inject echo
on and able to adjust the level. The trouble was they used to give
us what they thought we ought to have--you thought, "For God's sake,
why doesn't one of you sit in on a session and see what we're trying
to do?".'
The BTR1 appeared from EMI's R&D rooms in 1949, giving way to the
BTR2. 'It was still a mono machine,' Eltham says, 'but it had been
redesigned and it was pretty good. One of the big things was that
somebody at the factory designed a way of getting bias on the tape--the
previous method used to give quite a few harmonics that caused distortion.
Somebody there had designed a push-pull method of making an oscillator,
so it just gave out pure frequencies and no harmonics, and all the
harmonics were killed, and you got a pure source of bias in the tape,
and it didn't distort.' Today, such equipment commands equal measures
of respect and cash--although some original users remember its shortcomings.
