www.psneurope.com
March 2014 l 31
studiofeature
Re-make/ re-model
Phil Ward examines attitudes towards replica classics, and finds that there may be a market for classic replicas…
THE BLOGS are agog with classic gear. Here’s a recent sample from
Gearslutz.com: “My brother [is] about to shop for some real nice gear-candy, such as a Teletronix LA-2A, Urei 1176, TubeTech CL1B, Avalon M5, Avalon 737-SP and a Sony C800G. Can anyone tell me where to find this stuff? This guy wants the real deal!”
Immediately you see a
perceived gap between the “real deal” and anything else, whether that be a software emulation or one of a growing inventory of hardware replicas reproduced with varying degrees of faith, hope and charity. Faith, because technical accuracy is at the mercy of your sources; hope, because success is at the mercy of your technical accuracy; and charity, because many replicas are built with no commercial intentions at all. A small community of followers share their enthusiasm like a secret sect.
PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE Take Keith Andrews, who cut his technical teeth in the heyday of Amazon Studios in Liverpool and is now technical engineer at Full Sail University in Florida. “I’ve concentrated on building some ‘replicas’ of
A ReFill plug-in for Propellerhead users: can you think of a reason why not?
Say “Snap!” if you spot a box you already own
“Chandler has worked with original TG gear for years, so that has dictated our initial push into hardware”
Mirek Styles
my own,” he says. “I have a couple of processing racks with the usual suspects in them and, when [producer] Mick Glossop came to Florida a couple of years ago, I happily loaned him whatever he wanted, since we go back a bit and I always enjoyed working with him.” More recently Andrews has
been toying with a couple of hybrid ideas, combining the best of more than one unit in a way that sidesteps the issues of
Intellectual Property – not unlike creative sampling in music. The other challenge, he says, is consistency. “One problem is that there’s a wide range of standards of re-creation. Some builders aren’t perhaps as diligent or knowledgeable as the original creators, so you sometimes have to build a few of them to play with and discover where the shortfalls are. Some builders will only build one, for personal use.
The most common motivation is just to have a rare piece of kit without spending ‘genuine rarity’ dollars. For that reason even the same schematic can be built to many different standards by different people.” But despite the insularity of some corners of the replica scene, the commercial potential of reinvented racks is beginning to make itself felt. Andrews himself has partnered with fellow Brit Dafydd Roche to create Expat Audio, a going concern that supplies PCBs based on popular classics, while even ‘in-the-box’ pop producer Hal Ritson is attracted by the combination of retro outboard and new-build reliability. “I’m not averse to the concept
of re-makes,” he reveals. “If I was to buy a second microphone today
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