Audient

Audient was founded in 1997 by David Dearden and Gareth Davies after their previous company DDA (Dearden Davies Associates) was acquired by Klark Teknik. Before DDA, Dearden had built custom consoles for John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. The Audient ASP8024 carries direct DNA from DDA's recording consoles, filtered through decades of additional experience at Midas and Klark Teknik.

At a moment when the industry was abandoning large-format consoles in favour of computer-based recording, Audient set out to prove that analog mixing remained a viable professional choice. The ASP8024 launched in 1998 — the name stands for Analogue Signal Processing, with 80 inputs and 24 buses. Originally a fixed-format 24-channel three-bay desk with no configurable options, it was priced at around £15,000 — roughly a tenth of what comparable SSL or Neve desks cost. Its target was the mid-market: studios where a Mackie fell short but an SSL was out of reach.

Audient's later expansion into audio interfaces (iD series) brought that same DDA/Neve-era pedigree to home studio users. But the ASP8024 remains the company's defining statement: that analog large-format recording has a future, and that future sounds extraordinary.