Lisson Grove Debuts with Vintage-Style, All-Tube R-124 Compressor
Grammy Award-winning mixer, producer and engineer Hugo Nicolson (Radiohead, Primal Scream, Julian Cope) has announced the founding of Lisson Grove, a new boutique pro audio brand dedicated to recapturing the sound of vintage studio equipment.
Lisson Grove has debuted with the vintage-style R-124 compressor.
The company’s first offering is the R-124, a valve compressor based on the classic 1960s British studio units used extensively on all of the Beatles’ recordings. Reverse engineering one of the highly-modified Altec 436 originals, the new R-124 differs from its “holy grail” predecessor by utilizing modern, reliable components.
“Although the original models sounded fantastic, they always had difficulty producing adequate low end,” Nicolson says. “By using new parts–especially modern, high-quality transformers–we’ve been able to faithfully preserve the compression characteristics of the vintage units while offering a much fuller bandwidth and bigger sound.”
Hand-built, the R-124 is designed for tracking, mixing and mastering applications. From left to right, the 2U unit’s faceplate comprises a Balance control, chicken head knobs for Input and Output gain, a circular VU meter, rotary pots for Attack and Threshold, another chicken head knob for Release, and a power switch with bright jewel lamp. Rear panel connections include a power cord receptacle, 1/4-inch jacks for the Infinity and Link, and XLRs for In and Out.
With a slightly faster release than the British studio units, the Lisson Grove device also adds an Attack control, which can slow down the attack for mastering situations and other uses.
The Threshold control on the R-124 also uses the dynamically changing compressed signal as its point of reference rather than a fixed voltage. In other words, as the knob is rotated clockwise to raise the compression threshold, the tone changes slightly adding a subtle sparkle to the vocals or a mix.
A classic feature that Lisson Grove has preserved on the R-124 is the Infinity control, formerly known as Hold. In between each of the six recovery settings on the Release control is the infinity position, which is, in effect, an extremely long recovery time.
According to Lisson Grove, this particular feature has a variety of applications, the most useful being the ability to prime the R-124 before a take so that the very first note does not sound uncompressed. This is done by placing the compressor in an infinity position–one click up or down from the desired setting–having the artist play or sing a note before recording, then switching in the desired release time once recording has commenced. Another use of Infinity would be to prevent an increase in gain during silent passages. A 1/4-inch jack on the R-124’s rear panel accommodates an external foot switch for musicians recording themselves and requiring hands-free operation.
The Balance control allows users to balance out the two sides of the gain reduction valve, thus minimizing distortion and feed-through thumps. By pressing the adjacent button, the engineer can then adjust a small trim control until the pulsing sound is heard at its thinnest or lowest level, for practical in-use balancing out of the gain reduction valve.
The Lisson Grove R-124 compressor ($3,700.00) is exclusively distributed in the U.S. by Vintage King Audio.