Studer

And currently Revox is based in the southwest of Germany with our production and our main headquarter for all development that we do in a town called Villingen.

And we are as well based in Switzerland to this day in DTCon near Zurich, where our Swiss headquarters and where also the Revox world, where we have a big exhibition about all the devices we did back to the 30s, that Willi Studer did back to the 30s, our founder.

The name you maybe know also from our professional, for a very long time, professional partners, Studer.

So yeah, this is a bit who Revox is and where we are right now.

I noticed that you've really only just started doing reel-to-reel again in the last 10 years or so.

So we do bigger batch runs at our factory in Villingen for cassette.

For a master tape, we are, because the market is... naturally smaller and much more artisan than a cassette production, we do made-to-order products.

So to give you a bit of an insight into the production process, just very briefly, for a master tape, we have a line of 15 refurbished Studer A80 tape, reel-to-reel tape machines, and we can do one to 15 copies for a master tape.

So she was everybody's mother in a way.

I mean, the tape machine, because I was working with two inch tape that was still analog, this giant Studer tape machine, two inch reel to reel tape broke down during our studio session.

which meant maintenance had to be called.

An engineer had to come and repair the machine, which meant I got to hang out all day.

... or on a 20 f- on one of the most-

Studebaker 24 track

... yeah, like incredible, all tape, all performance.

Mm.

So I wasn't David Amlin schlub going around the AES show looking at all this gear that...

At the time, I had no place or no idea what I would do with, but just marveling at the big SSL and Neve consoles and the Studer.

And at the time, I guess Ampex was gone, but the Studer and Atari tape machines and tons of outboard gear and microphones.

I mean, it was like...

You know, put it bluntly, it's like a wet dream for every wannabe recording engineer or producer.

At the height, Sound on Sound, three serious studios, two SSL 9000Js when they were $600,000 each, an Eve Capricorn later replaced by Sony Oxford, half a million dollars.

Two 33-48s, that's another half a million dollars.

Five Studery 27s, two 250.

Tape machines at Sunset were another game changer.

In the 1970s, they mounted Ampex D17 and later Studer A800 tape recorders in each tracking room.

Tape gives that natural compression and harmonic saturation that you can't fake with digital plugins alone.

It subtly rounds peaks and adds a bit of glue to drum hits and vocal lines.