What is perhaps most notable about Abbey Road Studios’ prized and fetishized sound is that, to some extent, it relies on various one-of-a-kind home-made equipment that looks, to the untrained eye, as if it could be more at home in a quiet corner of the complex Doctor Who.
“The first thing I asked myself when Bowers & Wilkins approached us about Studio Mode is how can we make it authentic?” Mirek Stiles, audio product manager at Abbey Road Studios, tells WIRED. “Abbey Road and its parent company, EMI, made compressors, suppressors and the like for their owners, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, so how do we capture that sound?”
Which means that Bowers & Wilkins, along with Abbey Road Studios, not only found themselves trying to capture the “sonic fingerprint” of a physical room and import it into the digital domain, but they also found themselves trying to replicate the effects of single elements. , spreaders, mixers and other Heath Robinson-style studio equipment. This type of equipment at Abbey Road Studios is a legend of professional recording, so much so that when one of these devices is available, interest is deep and the offer is wild.
Despite the obvious and considerable challenges that came with bringing Abbey Road Studio Mode to market, Mirek seems simply happy with the results. “The cabin of a car is a very small and unpromising environment. But I already had some tools that I thought might help, and what’s important for authentic sound is the studio’s recording equipment and the techniques that recording engineers employ. Once the studio sound is mapped in the physical sense, a lot of experimentation results in a reliable formula.”
I’ve heard Abbey Road Studio Mode in action and, frankly, you can’t argue with its effectiveness. A colorful and immersive user interface, almost reminiscent of a screen garage bandallows the Volvo EX90 owner to select across a 180-degree horizontal plane between “vintage” and “modern” studio sound, while vertical adjustment between studio room and control room is also available. The user can select a position on either of these two axes to get the sound they like best and enjoy a visual display that feels miles ahead of any other car audio experience currently available.