Sound Techniques
Fourteen Consoles. A Lifetime of Music.
John Wood and Geoff Frost opened Sound Techniques in a Chelsea basement in 1965 and built exactly fourteen mixing consoles before ceasing production in 1971. Those fourteen desks have a combined musical legacy that most manufacturers with hundreds of products could never approach.
Frost built each console himself, entirely by hand, in configurations from four-track to sixteen-track. Wood ran the studio on Old Church Street — a room that became the spiritual home of the British folk revival and the quieter, more atmospheric fringe of British psychedelic rock. The quality of recording achieved there, on custom-built equipment made in small numbers by a single engineer, was extraordinary.
Sound Techniques consoles now exist in the category of objects that are simultaneously too rare to use and too resonant to merely display. They are among the most culturally significant artifacts of 1960s British recording.