This page lists the recording studio equipment we own and use every day. Everything below is in our rooms at 90 Ben Boyd Road, Neutral Bay, on Sydney’s lower north shore, unless the entry says otherwise. Where a model number matters, we have given it. However, where we are not certain of one, we have left it out rather than guess.
Not all of our recording studio equipment was bought. Seven pieces of the signal chain were made here by hand, by James Englund.
The room was built the same way. James, his father Dr Raymond Englund, and the studio technician Francis Mifsud of Mac Wizard did the construction, the wiring and the installation of the speaker array. Two of the acoustic guitars here were made by Dr Englund by hand, and the harpsichord on the property was his.
None of this is why you would book a studio. It is why the rest of the list looks the way it does.
Most sessions now live in the box, so the software matters as much as the recording studio equipment in the racks.
A rack-mounted Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra processor and 192 GB of memory — installed infrastructure rather than a computer on a desk. It matters for large immersive sessions, where the alternative is bouncing stems to cope.
Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic Pro and Reaper are all installed and current. Send a session in any of them and it opens. DaVinci Resolve handles picture; Dorico handles notation and parts, so scores are produced here rather than farmed out.
For immersive work there is the Dolby Atmos Renderer. For remote sessions, Source-Connect Pro in both version 3.9 and version 4 — worth stating, because a facility still running 3.9 cannot connect to a studio that has moved only to 4. We have recorded ADR with Rome and with Auckland this year on that basis, with picture and timecode locked at both ends.
Audio moves around the building over Dante and over analogue multicore. Both, not one — so nothing you arrive with is incompatible.
Most of the work now happens in the box, so the question that matters is not what is in the rack. It is whether your session opens, and whether it sounds the way it did at home.
Send us your session before the day and we will open it and tell you exactly what is missing. Then you can print those tracks to audio before you arrive. A printed stem always opens. Nobody spends the first hour of a booked session finding out.
If you would rather check for yourself, this is what is installed.
Native Instruments Komplete, with Kontakt 7 · Spectrasonics Omnisphere, Trilian and Stylus RMX · Vienna Symphonic Library, Synchron and Ensemble · Toontrack Superior Drummer 3 · Steinberg HALion Sonic 7 and Groove Agent · IK Multimedia AmpliTube 5 and TONEX
The Universal Audio plugin library, running on two UAD-2 Octo PCIe cards — dedicated processing hardware, so the plugins are not taking CPU away from your session · Soundtoys 5 · Celemony Melodyne 5 · Antares Auto-Tune · iZotope Ozone 11 for mastering
iZotope RX 11, which is what the audio restoration service actually runs on. Noise, hum, clicks, clipping, a lapel microphone rustling, a siren through the middle of a good take — most of it comes back.
Dolby Atmos Renderer · Source-Connect Pro 3.9 and 4 · Dante throughout the building, on a Focusrite RedNet D16R and an RME Digiface Dante · Trinnov D-Mon room correction
Microphones are the largest single part of our recording studio equipment: around fifty, grouped by what they are for rather than by who made them.
Two microphones carry an additional charge: the Sony C-800G and the Wagner U47w, at $33 per hour including GST, as listed on the rates page. Both are exceptional microphones that need specialist servicing, and the charge covers their upkeep. Tell us when you book and whichever you want will be ready on a stand.
Twenty-eight channels of discrete outboard preamp across ten boxes, and no console. That is deliberate. A large desk gives you the same preamp seventy-two times; this gives you a choice of character for every source.
The dynamics are largely one family studied properly: the Teletronix and Universal Audio lineage in both optical and FET form, plus the valve original.
For EQ, two Pultec EQP-1 program equalisers — one made by Pultec, one made here. For reverb, a Bricasti M7.
Conversion is all Prism Sound: a Dream ADA-128 at twenty-four channels in and out, and a Titan at eight. Thirty-two channels each way, one converter platform, no mixed chain.
A mix that only sounds right in one room is not finished. Everything here is arranged around checking that it translates to other systems.
Twenty-two full-range monitors and four subwoofers, reconfigurable by format. Immersive layouts are not interchangeable — a cinema, a streaming mix, an 11.1.4 home system and a game engine all want different arrangements — so the array is a superset and each zone is powered and switched independently. Your mix is auditioned in the layout it will actually be played back in.
The room is corrected by a Trinnov D-Mon, measured rather than guessed at, so what you hear at the desk is the mix and not the walls.
An Avantone Pro MixCube covers the other end: mono compatibility, which catches phase problems a large array will never reveal, and whether the mix survives a poor single speaker. Phone speakers, club systems and broadcast fold-down all still matter.
For headphones, Sennheiser HD 600s driven by a Rupert Neve Designs RNHP. The HD 600 is a 300-ohm headphone and most outputs under-drive it; this one does not.
Power is treated as part of the signal path. The studio runs on a dedicated three-phase audio circuit with its own earth electrode, driven for the purpose. Signal-path equipment is fed from a PS Audio P10 regenerator, which rebuilds the mains waveform rather than filtering it. The speakers are fed from Shunyata Research Venom AU-8 distribution — forty thousand amps of surge protection and better than 24 dB of high-frequency noise rejection — through Furutech power cabling. Each array is switched independently, so only the speakers a format needs are running. Every lead and appliance in the building is tested and tagged to AS/NZS 3760, the same test and tag Sydney service we provide to bands, venues and other studios.
Available to clients on request. Ask when you book and we will have what you need set up and ready.
James plays four Yanagisawa saxophones — baritone, tenor, alto and soprano — as well as viola, violin and trumpet, along with piano, guitar, bass and drums. Real horns and strings can go on your record without booking anyone in. Session playing is charged per instrument per song; see the rates page.
A harpsichord and an acoustic piano sit elsewhere on the property. Both can be recorded where they stand — analogue over a multicore snake, or multichannel over Dante.
Download the full equipment and software list (PDF) — three pages, with model numbers and the software versions left off this page.
All of the recording studio equipment above is included in the hourly rate, apart from the Sony C-800G and Wagner U47w, which carry a $33 per hour charge.
If you are weighing up whether the room suits your project, come and look at it first. Book a free studio consultation, or see the studio rates.
