Studer

Willi Studer founded his company in Regensdorf, Switzerland in 1948 with a background in radio engineering and a conviction that Swiss precision manufacturing could produce professional audio equipment to a standard that no other country could match. He was right — and for the next five decades, Studer machines sat at the centre of the world's finest recording studios.

The company's primary legacy is in tape machines: the C37, A62, A80, A820, A800, A827 are some of the most respected recording machines ever manufactured. The A800 and A827 remain in active use today in studios that refuse to abandon analog tape. But Studer also built a range of large-format mixing consoles — less celebrated than their tape machines, but no less carefully engineered.

The Studer 900 series console was the company's most important recording desk — a large-format in-line design used extensively by the BBC and major European public broadcasters, and by commercial studios in Switzerland, Germany, and across the continent. Its sound was characteristically Swiss: very clean, extremely extended in frequency response, with a neutrality that complemented Studer's own tape machines perfectly. What you recorded on a Studer machine mixed on a Studer console, you heard exactly what was on the tape.

Studer was acquired by Harman International in 1994. The Studer brand continues as part of the Harman Professional group, primarily in the digital console and broadcast markets through the Vista series.