Having begun his career at the legendary Olympic and Townhouse studios, it made sense for Andy to turn to ex Olympic maintenance engineer Paul Wilkes for the installation of the upgrade.
He explained: "Paul did a great job and recommended we used Van Damme blue series cable almost exclusively because of its reliability and suppleness when running it around corners and tight turns. The studio is based around a Pro Tools HDX system with Xmon software and I use an Icon 24 mixing surface which suits me and the way I work. Originally the Icon was hardwired for mixing only, but we added a patch bay, set up in the traditional way, so that I can introduce outboard like say, Neve pre-amps, and outboard compressors as I want. In other words it turned into a major project to turn the studio into a world class facility."
The main control room is 6mx6m and now includes tie lines to the recording area, enabling Andy to connect a visiting laptop or other device to the desk. With stereo and surround capabilities and the 72 io Pro Tools system as well as 8 x 8 way connections in & out of the X-mon monitoring system, which handles all the speaker & monitor configurations, the connections involved over 250m of Van Damme Blue Series 24 way multicore as well as 50m of 2-way.
Andy added: "All the connectors, cable and assemblies were supplied by VDC Trading who I am pleased to say were great, really on the case."
(Jim Evans)
