Installing the Beast: Our Neve V1

Hailing from Studio SQ, formerly located in the Mission Hill district of San Francisco, we welcome back our beast of a friend, our 1985 Neve V1 32-channel/32-bus audio recording console.

We are excited about installing it in Britelite's new R&D facility, which will be up and running in just a few weeks. The studio portion of this multifunctional space will be used primarily to record, mix, and master our in-house projects. It will also serve as a workspace to experiment with sound design and explore its role in creating successful immersive environments.

From Nashville to the Bay Area.

When we picked it up in Petaluma from Blighty Studios back in 2010, we learned this console’s rich history had begun in Nashville's renowned Blackbird Studios near the time of its issue. This console lived in “Studio B” and was used on albums from top country acts like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Dolly Parton. According to Sean Beresford at Blighty, Studio B was known to house Johnny Cash's favorite console in all of Blackbird Studios. Since our first install 5 years ago, we have familiarized ourselves with this inline analog console and its array of features, making us incredibly fond of its capabilities. It has transformer mic pre-amps, HP/LP filters, dynamics (comp/gate), a 4-band eq and all sorts of other extras. Some optional features include four stereo reverb returns and upgraded Uptown automation. The board also has a cool “pan circuit” feature which can be removed from any channel, thereby panning it to center and raising it by 3db, which comes in handy when you need just a little more headroom in your signal.

Having been mostly recapped when we purchased it, we decided to continue modifying the board in hopes of optimizing it for our particular needs. The Neve V1 uses 5534/2 series op-amps throughout most of its audio circuits, and although they are very nice op-amps, we decided on OPA604’s for the master section. We then swapped out the existing eq and line amps for some OPA2134’s. We also replaced the signal caps in the master section with high-quality electrolytic caps and bypassed them with WIMA .1uf film caps for better high-end response. The mods helped bring down the internal noise a bit and improved the overall sound, which was already pretty fantastic.

The Original Beastmode...

...as mentioned before, this thing is massive and as such, is not meant to be moved on a regular basis. Requiring about 1,500 new solder points in and out of its patchbay each time you move it and weighing close to 1,000 lbs, this console is a feat to move and takes days to fully install. Now that the bulk of the work on the Neve is over, we have time to tend to other studio details such as enabling full Pro Tools digital integration and building an iso-recording booth.

We will keep you updated on the progress of the entire build-out in future posts. We can’t wait to show you what's in store for this space.