Not just a desk job

If you've ever seen a TV documentary interview with a record producer, the chances are he - or very infrequently she - will have been sitting at a mixing console. One of those things that look like a control desk at Nasa: a small fortune in blinking lights, VU meters, sliders and rotary pots. There is also a pretty good chance that Solid State Logic (SSL) built the console. In the mid-1990s the UK-based pro-audio company had an 80 per cent global share in the large mixing desk market. Its clients work with the biggest names in rock music - the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Roxy Music, David Bowie. To complete the picture, the control room where these artists' records are mixed will be lined with acoustic panels and there will be lots of opulent-looking peach-coloured wood surfaces. There will also be a pair of Yamaha NS-10 studio monitors. The ones with the white cones.

At The Enid

Niall Feldman, SSL's director of new products, picks me up at Oxford railway station in his bottle-green BMW and heads for the company's facility in Begbroke, deep in rural Oxfordshire, where the design and manufacture takes place. At the Royal Sun pub we turn into a leafy science park and what appear to be almost utopian working conditions.

As I'm shown into one of the console demonstration rooms I get a feeling of déjà vu. I mention to Feldman that I'm certain I've been here before. "You have," he says. "This is where we recorded a demo about 20 years ago." While I was laying down guitar tracks with a Welsh pop band, Feldman was the tape op, producer, keyboard player and session engineer.

This was in his early days at SSL, but Feldman's career in professional audio has deeper roots, going back to his childhood ambition of becoming a musician. "I very quickly realised that for an electrical musical instrument you need amplifiers. My dad owned a TV shop and he said that the cheapest way to get an amplifier is to build it yourself. He said, here's a book on electronics, here's a kit, now go and make one."

After leaving school Feldman read electronics: "At the time I was convinced that I wanted to have something to do with recording studios. I spent most of my spare time playing or recording music."

On graduating, Feldman "had the good fortune" to get a job in a recording studio owned by progressive rockers The Enid. He arrived expecting there to be both assistant and maintenance engineers, but within a month Feldman was the person on site who knew how to drive the console. He spent 18 months in the deep end, managing sessions, doing everything from getting the band into the studio, getting the mics set up, starting the recording process. But working with musicians was taking its toll: "I realised that if you wanted to become a successful recording engineer you had to spend a lot of emotional energy dealing with some quite - shall we say - complicated characters. And there was no guarantee of success."

It was at this point that Feldman decided that he wanted a more regular job that combined electronics with the recording business. In 1988 he arrived at SSL as a systems engineer, which at the time meant carrying around two cases of components, a soldering iron and "an understanding of how recording studios went together".

Feldman spent most of his early years installing recording consoles, which involved arriving at a studio or a broadcast facility and integrating the desk with all the other bits of kit that sat around the studio. Often this would also involve training the equipment owners and maintenance people who were going to use the machinery. This procedure would take a week or two, and it was not unknown for the engineer to jump ship and stay with the desk, becoming a studio engineer for the client.

Digitisation

The concept of digitising audio had existed from the early 1980s, around the time when Sony and Philips started to talk about producing compact discs. This was also the time when computers started to make their way into music production, and SSL was part of the early pioneering work into how to combine the concept of a processing engine with manipulating audio, or managing information flow within the studio. By the time Feldman arrived at SSL, samplers were in their infancy, and sequencers were being instructed by MIDI. But if you wanted to record anything of any length, you still had to use tape (see 'Changing the workflow' on facing page).

According to Feldman the most interesting issue at the start of his career was storage: "Digital storage has driven revolutions in audio production. When I started at SSL we'd already made some digital products, one of which was a digital system designed for CD production, and the other a hard-disk audio editing system designed to work alongside a system from Quantel, who were making the first hard-disk video editing equipment at the time."

For most followers of the pro-audio equipment market the golden age of recording studios were the years from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, when SSL was producing enormous, 100-plus channel recording and mixing consoles.

Feldman says: "If you talked to the man in the street five or six years ago then no one really would have heard of us. We've got a credit on a KLF track - '3AM Eternal (Live at the SSL)' - but that's as far as our public persona went. But, among professional audio engineers we're a very recognisable brand. and that's largely due to the penetration of our big mixing consoles into studios."

The flagship product was the SL 9000 series famous for its ultra-clean SuperAnalogue processing, in contrast with the earlier SL 4000 series that was known for its 'warm' sound. This disparity of approach inevitably led to the two technologies being combined in the Duality large-format production console. Duality has an interesting microphone input stage where there are two microphone pre-amplifiers (hence the name), one of which is a "really beautiful linear analogue preamp, with amazing distortion and frequency response characteristics and incredibly low noise, and is as good a microphone pre-amplifier as you can get". The other has patented distorting characteristics that can be tailored to sound like, say, a transistorised or valve-based distortion. "That's all about harmonic frequency content and how the mic pre-amp responds to the dynamics of the signal."

During the heyday of large console manufacturing, SSL was owned by Carlton Communication, then, after a short period of venture capital funding, the company was sold to Peter Gabriel - a long-standing client of SSL - and broadcast technologist David Engelke. They brought in a senior management team comprising several ex-SSL personnel. "The new owners and management team really understood the business and SSL's technologies, and really gave impetus to what we wanted to achieve," says Feldman.

At this time the company was developing a new analogue workstation that was to become the AWS 900. Feldman says that a fast-emerging market dictated the need for this new product. The design criteria were that it should look like an SSL console and it should be affordable. "It was 'what could you fund on a credit card' basically, providing you were of reasonable means and had a good credit limit."

SSL's research showed that, in the composition of a typical project studio, there would be a £1,500 desktop computer, surrounded by several tens of thousands of pounds worth of auxiliary equipment. Feldman remembers the early concept meetings, where "we asked if we integrated all these components and put them all in one box, then why isn't that a good idea? Indeed, the moment we launched the AWS 900 we started to sell to exactly that market place - little project studios. There were lots of those growing up all over the place."

Audio plug-ins

As technology allows music producers to work with little more than a PC and an I/O box, SSL has entered the software plug-ins market, but Feldman insists that there's still space for analogue. What he finds fascinating is that there are several manufacturers emulating pieces of SSL signal technology, in particular the processing from the older analogue consoles.

"On paper they all emulate similar hardware and you'd think that if all you needed were analysis tools and software they'd all sound the same," says Feldman. But there is a good deal of lively forum debate about how these emulations sound and which ones are preferred. This for Feldman is an indication of how much left there is to learn about emulating analogue audio processes in the digital domain. SSL is working with instrumentation developers to keep ahead of what's being designed, so that they can test the reproducibility of the technology being developed by SSL.

A significant temptation for SSL must have been to concentrate on large-scale, expensive products although the rise of the project studio meant the market for large-scale commercial studios was changing. "The issue," says Feldman, "is that we're in a technology-driven market where there are quite often big influences that are difficult to predict." This has led to the company becoming more broadly spread, both in the markets it sells into and the underlying technology. "We've developed digital technology, created software products and segmented our analogue processing into small, modular systems so we've got a selection of smaller products we can sell into a range of applications."

Back in the 'Duality' control room I ask Feldman if he's ready for some photographs. He tells me that we can do some shots, but not in here. There's hardware development going on, and it's all very secret. He shows me into another demo room, where he's happy to adopt the classic pose of the studio engineer, arms folded leaning on a pair of Yamaha NS-10 monitor speakers. The ones with the white cones.