In our recent Things We Loved In November 2022 podcast, when considering the new Hitsville Chambers from UAD, Russ pointed out that the roof space used as a reverb chamber in that building was the same as the the other buildings in that street and while the records which came from that studio were exceptional, the reverb chamber was probably not. It was used because it was there but because it was used it became an integral part of something historic and important. This does rather beg the question, what would have happened if the Hitsville building in Detroit had had a domed roof, or a disused storm drain underneath it. The ‘classic sound’ is a by-product of happenstance and engineers recognising something useful when it presents itself.
If it can happen with reverb chambers, where else might this have happened and are we rewriting history with a combination of retrospect and rose tinted specs? Here a some contenders which present a question - Which came first, the aesthetic or the equipment?
Lexicon Reverb
In the same podcast, Dom Morley suggested that Lexicon reverbs were so pervasive in the records of the 1980s that the sound of reverb, our expectation of what ‘good’ reverb sounded like was basically the sound of a Lexicon. The interesting thing about this is that Lexicon were able to deliver a reverb which sounded as good as it did because of clever programming and design which allowed the very limited power available at the time to deliver subjectively superior results compared to other designs available. But those power constraints lessened significantly over time. While almost any current reverb is technically superior, that legacy of expectation about how a good reverb sounds persists. So is this another case of right place right time? Would we appreciate the effect of the modulation in the Lexicon Random Hall if it were created today? The jury is out on that one…
Classic Valve Amplifiers
Some gear is objectively, measurably better than other gear. The 1176 for example might be valued for its tone and character but like so much gear it was designed to be as clean as possible (which is this case wasn’t all that clean!). However it was fast. That was its advantage and it was measurably faster than the slower valve designs common at the time. However there is a distinction to be drawn here between sound reproduction and sound creation. At the creation stage there is no objective ‘right’. Look at the audio performance of a Leslie speaker. It’s not accurate, but it’s not meant to be. For sound reproduction things are less arbitrary.
Guitar amplifiers are a case in point here because the amplifier is as much part of the sound of the electric guitar as the guitar itself. The early Fender amps were a continuation of a partnership started during WW2 in which Leo Fender and his then business partner Doc Kaufmann made amplifiers for lap steels. The much revered Tweeds and Bassmans were developments of these products and were designed to be clean and powerful.
By modern standards they are neither but the tone they impart has worked in parallel with the instruments and the music. They have shaped what an electric guitar is ‘supposed’ to sound like. Something which is very informative about this is the way many musicians who are contemporaries of the equipment itself and used it when it was new view these tools. A friend told me a story of a pro guitarist in his late 60s who sold his 1960s AC30 and got himself a modern Laney, which he preferred. I feel the same when I see a Boss pedal from the 80s which I left at a friend’s house years ago and never went back for now revered by people 20 years younger than me and changing hands at inflated prices. There’s a lot of retrospection involved here…
SSL Bus Compressor
This last example I’m gong to cite is possibly controversial. Maybe even audio heresy but is the special thing about the SSL Bus Compressor actually that it was built into SSL consoles and therefore got front and centre billing at most of the most important mix sessions of the 80s and 90s? For many of the same reasons that post mixers use Pro Tools’ stock plugins I suspect that the Bus Compressor got used because it does the job well and it’s right there. Over time the characteristics of that particular compressor became associated with the sound of records and in much the same way as Lexicon reverb sounds right because it’s familiar, so does the SSL bus compressor.
Maybe it’s the pairing with the SSL console? They are famously well suited to aggressive music, though as early as 1978 staff at Townhouse Studios built their own SSL compressor for their Helios equipped Studio 1 so perhaps the SSL Bus Compressor would have got classic status even if it hadn’t been under the noses of all those mix engineers, in a rather pleasing return to the first example, probably right next to a Lexicon LARC remote…
What do you think?