This response came up yesterday in the thread "
Recreating a classic album???"... and while I was kind of unnecessarily harsh in my original response... it was because it struck a nerve.
There are so many myths and so much bullshit that flies around, especially in the "Home Recording" areas that it just kinda got to me.
I started this thread with the hope that other "myths" could be discussed and put to sleep once and for all [like the bullshit myth that you can't plug a ribbon mic into anything running phantom power or the world will end]...
After you get done skipping over my diatribe from hell... maybe y'all could come up with some of the other mythological crap started by some of the half trained idiots of our industry and we can put some of them to bed.
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With all due respect Rico you haven't got the remotest clue of what the fuck you're talking about.
Beggar's Banquet was made in Olympic Studios in London on the second deck made for Olympic by their tech at the time; Dick Swettenham. Dick Swettenham was subsequently bankrolled by Chris Blackwell [Island Records] to start the console manufacturing company called "Helios".
The desk at Olympic was 24 channels with 8 busses. The equalizer was a 3 band that featured a 10kHz shelf boost only, 6 selectable midrange frequencies [which were also boost only but switchable between "peak" (additive EQ) or "trough" (subtractive EQ)] with a 50Hz boost only feature on the low end or a stepped 12db per octave hi pass filter that had half a dozen positions and started as high as 400Hz [this is all from memory... I haven't seen one of these damn things in well over 10 years].
I actually owned the console for a while. Jimmy Miller was actually at my house when it showed up. There I was all proud of my latest purchase... and as we were rolling it off the truck Jimmy looked at me and said "that's my desk!!". I smiled and said "yes it is". He scowled and said "that thing was a piece of shit in 1968, what the hell would you want with it now?".
The desk ran on negative 24volt Germanium transistors and was quite noisey. Jimmy was right, the desk was a pig... and my options were to restore it to it's original glory or break it up and sell it for the bits. Part of the frame is holding up the pile of fire wood behind my house so I guess you can figure which direction I took.
Now... with all that nostalgia bullshit put to the side... let's talk about this horseshit toob fetish especially as it applies to the cheap toob crap you can find in your local Banjo Mart for mere pennies of what it should cost. OK, the Brick is somewhat of an exception as it's low price is a direct result of it being built where you could blindfold the assemblers with dental floss... but there's more to this "cheapassed tubemania" than using Chinese factories.
First... you guys need to understand that the people building "tube" stuff back in the day were going for the highest possible fidelity attainable... they were going for the lowest distortion possible, they were trying to get the stuff to sound "neutral". They
were not going for the "toob" sound, they were trying to
get away from the toob sound.
Now one of the nice things about tube circuits is that if they're designed well they'll have headroom for days [things that the cheapassed shit with glowy things inside... even "the Brick" doesn't have]. You're into D.W. Fearn and Thermionic Culture and Pendulum Audio and even Manley Labs before you're talking about real tube equipment... that TL Audio bullshit doesn't make the grade.
One of the other things that you really have to understand about tube equipment is that the majority of "the sound" was created by the 'phase shift' as well as the 'ringing and overshoot' of the transformers involved in the circuits. It wasn't necessarily the tubes [though they did add some musically pleasing distortions and a little natural tube compression when driven... but I'm not writing 15,000 words on the subject so let's just leave it at most of "the sound" you're hearing is transformers... not the tubes].
Desks like the Olympic desk were also chock full of pretty cool transformers [which they haven't gotten close to recreating in the current "Helios reissue" crap]... as was Neve stuff from that era, and Raindirk stuff from that era, and MCI stuff from that era, and API stuff from that era, and Sphere, and even Soundcraft [who at one time made a pretty outstanding sounding console called the Series One which is about the last desk they built that was actually worth a flying fuck from a sonic perspective].
Yes, the Stones could afford whatever they wanted from a technical perspective... which is why they had state of the art stuff like this custom Olympic desk [which just happened to be attached to one of the coolest sounding rooms in London that just happened to be in Olympic Studios]... and 3M M-56 16 track machines [also transistor machines... but 'class A/discrete' and also full of (gasp) really good sounding transformers].
Look Rico... I know it looks like I'm ragging on you a bit... probably because I am, but really I'm ragging more on the bullshit half truths and horseshit myths that incompetent know nothing jag offs who write for jag off magazines because they can't get a real gig or worse work as a floor mook in the local Banjo Mart so they can use their employee discount to buy themselves some of that there cool assed toob gear so they can sound just like that Lenny Kravitz fellow.
Dude... don't believe the bullshit... believe your ears. Learn basic electronic theory, learn music theory, learn about rhythm and harmony... learn about harmonic structure and phase shift and shit like that and all of a sudden you'll find yourself making way better recordings than if you listen to some fucking moron who can spew dumbass hype about some cockamamie half truths he learned from someone only slightly less dumb than him.
Best of luck with all you do... and please pay the morons no mind. Listen for yourself and the world will really open itself up to you in ways you never imagined.
Peace.
