The Epic Effort to Save a Rare Focusrite Studio Console

Los Angeles, CA (March 22, 2023)—Only 10 Focusrite Studio Consoles had been ever constructed and solely 4 are identified to nonetheless exist; now one has been restored and put in in Arizona.

The uncommon desk, serial quantity 5, was put in in The Focusrite Room, a novel 1,500-square-foot management room, a part of a 6,000-square-foot recording complicated within the Phoenix space. The console was initially positioned at BOP Studios in South Africa, itself a pioneering world-music enterprise.

“Bringing Number Five again was a life-changing occasion,” says The Focusrite Room and Platinum Underground studio proprietor and longtime Focusrite aficionado, John Aquilino, referring to the nickname the desk has acquired. “When I used to be a teen, as a substitute of a poster of Farrah Fawcett on my wall, I had an image of a Focusrite Studio Console, so you would say I’m a fairly large fan of the model and its expertise. Now, this console is prepared for the following chapter in its life.”

BOP Studios started with the perfect of intentions: to be a world-class music-production facility in one of many world’s most distant but creatively fertile places. Political and financial issues—the nation was beneath the oppressive thumb of apartheid when BOP opened in 1991—posed vital challenges to protecting the ability viable, and it has been closed for a lot of the final 20-plus years.

BOP was supposed as a vacation spot the place African and Western artists and musicians may intersect and collaborate, with state-of-the-art expertise, acoustical design (the studio’s architect was the legendary late Tom Hidley) and resort-level lodging. The Focusrite Studio Console was a centerpiece in BOP’s flagship Studio 1, the place it operated alongside consoles from Neve (Studio 2) and SSL (Studio 3); all three had been the most important of their variety ever put in on the time. Visiting artists included Laura Branigan, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba and the Soweto String Quartet. Disney’s The Lion King soundtrack was additionally recorded and produced on the studio.

The Focusrite Studio Console was remarkably intact when Aquilino found it. He organized a group together with his accomplice within the studio, Ken Hirsch of Orphan Audio, in addition to steerage from Phil Dudderidge, chairman of Focusrite Audio Engineering, who had acquired Focusrite from founder Rupert Neve in 1989. The group went to BOP Studios in September 2019, the place they bought and disassembled the console over the course of 10 days, then shipped it again to Platinum Underground, the place Aquilino had already designed, with Hanson Hsu of Delta H Design, a brand new studio room to be constructed round it.

Platinum Underground, which opened in 2016, was designed by the late Vincent Van Haaff and is constructed 30 ft beneath floor. The new Focusrite Room is above and to the facet of that.

Not surprisingly in any case that point, the relocated console wanted some refurbishing, which included a whole recapping and new switches, in addition to the alternative of 4,600 LEDs. The restoration course of was initially began by Joel Gette of Thermal Relief Design in Las Vegas earlier than the desk was moved to its new web site within the Phoenix suburb of Mesa for its full and full restoration and recommissioning by Ken Hirsch and his group at Orphan Audio.

Once contained in the studio, further HVAC, with a customized plenum and silent-running followers, needed to be put in to maintain the console at a continuing 72 to 74 levels F. The console’s authentic pair of seven-foot-tall energy racks have been changed with simply three ft of contemporary, high-efficiency provides designed by Hirsch. The historic GML automation is changed with the Tangerine Automation Interface for GML Automation from THD Labs, which integrates instantly with the console faders on a fader-by-fader, bucket-by-bucket foundation, with all of that management data despatched over a USB bus to the pc.

“The automation is now seamless and clear between the {hardware} of the desk and the person’s DAW,” Aquilino explains. “Any person can come into the studio, hearth up a session, load up this plug-in and simply go, and never have to fret about figuring out some archaic, proprietary software program.”

The Focusrite Studio Console got here again to life late final 12 months and did a sequence of native productions, with Aquilino, an completed engineer for artists together with Metal Allegiance, Sacred Reich and Soulfly, on the board.

Aquilino says that the studio can also be within the means of implementing Dante connectivity between each the brand new Focusrite Room and The Platinum Underground’s present SSL management room, massive monitoring room and isolation cubicles. Aquilino has additionally chosen the S5H speaker from ADAM Audio, a part of the Focusrite household, for the mains in The Focusrite Room.