How did you end up with a Sphere console?
This console came from Nashville to Echo Park's Studio B here in Bloomington in the '90s. Echo Park was the big pro studio here when I came to Bloomington for college. They closed its doors for good about nine years ago.
Yeah, very well known.
It was owned by Mike Wanchic [John Mellencamp's guitarist], and Mark Hood [MX-80 Sound, John Scofield, Mellencamp]. When I was a first-year IU [Indiana University Bloomington] audio engineering student in '99, we took a tour and I saw the Sphere for the first time and was completely mesmerized. Eleven years later, in 2010, Mark was closing the B Room and was selling the Sphere. I had a month of unbooked studio time, so I bought the console and called Greg Norman [Tape Op #87] from Electrical Audio to come in and commission the desk.
He's awesome!
He is! He's coming back next week to do some tech work. The biggest challenge of installing the desk was getting it into the studio. In fact, we have a window in our control room thanks to that console. The console's frame is one huge piece, so it wouldn't fit through the doors. We had to remove the entire exterior facing wall of the control room, and the movers backed the truck right up to the floor. My buddy, Pete Schreiner, who built the studio with me in the summer of 2008 in between his Magnolia Electric Company tours, tore down the wall that morning, and as soon as the console was loaded in he put up a brand-new exterior wall and added a glass block window while he was at it – all in one day!
That's insane.
Yeah. If I did it now, I'd put two double doors there and hide them behind drywall.
Did you install the Sphere and get it up and running as it was?
Yeah. And it worked, surprisingly. But it had seen a lot of modifications over the years before I got it. I'm fairly certain it's the first console Sphere made after Electrodyne closed shop. In fact, the console's internal wiring was all labeled "Electrodyne." The console was commissioned by Bob Beckham for his publishing house, Combine Music; they were responsible for writing a ton of country hits in the '70s and early '80s. This was the console in his writer's studio, so no hits were recorded on it, but hundreds of hits were written and demoed on it. There were less than 60 Sphere consoles ever made, and most of them were parted out later on. Based on my research, I discovered that before the Eclipse Type A consoles, Sphere made a Type I and a Type II. Ours was the only Type II they ever made. I think approximately five Type I consoles were made, and they look a lot like our Type II except they are shallower and more than twice as wide. The Type I and II were designed right before the in-line console concept became the standard, so on the Type II, the whole left section is tape returns and EQs, and the whole right section is mic preamps, sends, and such. Honestly, at least for today's modern studio, the Type I is a pain in the ass because they take up too much room and are hard to navigate. Also, the Type I and II came with Sphere's proprietary Mix Log, an early mix recall system that used a series of tones that would be sent from the board to the head of your multitrack tape on mixdown, going through hundreds of relays. Then you would play those tones back through the console during your next mixing session and set all of the levels on each channel to read zero on the meters to recall your previous mix settings. It was a total electronic and maintenance nightmare, and it would fall out of calibration, add noise to the desk, and took hours to set up. You might as well just start a new mix at that point! The Mix Log circuitry was all removed by Mike Stucker when he was the tech for Echo Park. When I got the desk, it still had the huge Mix Log panel. I had no idea what that was until I started digging into the history. Anyway, after Greg and I spent a week installing the desk it was working well enough to do sessions. I then recapped every module. These old boards are awesome because everything's modular, which makes them really easy to work on.
You can always see the parts clearly.
