VIDEO: RECORDING, 1950s STYLE:

As “Yep,” the recording engineer/producer who wrote the bulk of the posts of the legendary “Why Do Your Recordings Sound Like Ass” thread at the Cockos Reaper DAW forum noted in 2008:

The explosion in prices for “vintage” and “boutique” gear was not driven by professional studios. Even before the home-studio boom, the arrival of cheap, high quality digital and better broadcast technologies made a whole lot of local recording and broadcast studios redundant. There was a small increase in inexpensive project studios, fueled by the rise of punk, hip-hop, and “indie” music, but for the most part, the emergence of the ADAT and Mackie mixers spelled the beginning of the end for mid-market commercial recording studios, and began to turn broadcast studios into cheap, commodity workplaces devoid of the old-school audio “engineers” (who actually wore lab coats in the old days of calibrating cutting lathes and using oscilloscopes to measure DC offset and so on).

The irony is that the explosion of cheap, high-quality digital fostered a massive cottage industry of extremely small home and project studios, that rapidly began to develop a keen interest in high-end studio gear. Even as broadcast and small commercial jingle studios and local TV stations (of which there were a LOT, back then) were dumping their clunky mixing consoles and old-fashioned ribbon mics and so on, there was a massive rise in layperson interest in high-end studio gear. As the price of entry has gotten lower and lower, interest in and demand for truly “pro quality” sound has increased exponentially, and superstition and reverential awe has grown up around anything that pre-exists the digital age.

Dean Amos, the owner of the studio located in Wickford, Essex, UK, in the above new Sound on Sound magazine video has taken that love of vintage tube-based gear and ‘50s-era ribbon microphones to its logical conclusion; he’s recreated the sort of studio that Elvis or Buddy Holly would have recorded in, around 1957 or so, right down to a three track reel-to-reel recorder. But unless you’ve got live performance chops in the neighborhood of either of those two artists, the mixture of vintage mics, pre-amps and compressors with modern-day editing and pitch correction software is likely to yield far better results. But it’s still an incredibly cool looking – and sounding – studio.