For you old studio dogs....what do you consider to have been good investments?

[Whoops]

There is a story from an older studio owner who proclaimed his best investment for the studio was the ping pong table. His reasoning was the snout of billable hours people spent playing ping pong vs recording or mixing.

;D ;D ;D

That seems a much better investment than spending money on an obsolete console or analog mixer.

 

[pucho812]

;D ;D ;D

That seems a much better investment than spending money on an obsolete console or analog mixer.

well it does generate income...

Another way to look at it... I had a known mastering engineer drop off a piece of gear for repair. This was after his in house tech looked at it and I was working for  there manufacture of that piece of gear at the time.
After fixing it, which all it needed was a recap and some calibration tweets after the recap.
He told me the following. I have had this unit for 17 years.  In 17 years, the only time it hit the bench was with you. It cost X amount to fix it.  I paid X amount for the unit 17 years ago. in 17 years I have mastered 4000 albums and if we say 10 songs an album that is 40,000 songs mastered with this unit. If I crunch the numbers, to use this unit it costs me 32 cents a song. best investment ever.


Since that day I have looked at gear purchases a lot differently.

 

[Gold]

I’m selling my Maselec MLA2 compressor. It was the first piece of mastering gear I bought in 1996. Still works perfectly. Its had a couple rotary switches replaced over the years but thats it. It’s worth about what i payed for it in 1996. Not bad. Ive mastered thousands of albums with that.

 

[mateus]

Some really nice posts here! For my 2 cents, it's the same everyone's saying, transducers and instruments. Good mics, good monitors/phones, and good instruments.
Cheers!

 

[ruffrecords]

For me it was the revelation of Studer butterfly tape heads. Totally bump free down to 20Hz. I don't know why everyone doesn't use them.

Cheers

Ian

 

[Gold]

For me it was the revelation of Studer butterfly tape heads. Totally bump free down to 20Hz. I don't know why everyone doesn't use them.

Cheers

Ian

None of my three A80 VU preview decks have butterfly heads. I've never seen a preview head block with butterfly heads. I've always wondered why. It seems like it would beneficial for stereo deck. When I had the 1" deck made John French, who made the head stack didn't ask if I wanted butterfly heads and Dan Zellman who put together the deck didn't specify them.

 

[abbey road d enfer]

None of my three A80 VU preview decks have butterfly heads. I've never seen a preview head block with butterfly heads. I've always wondered why. It seems like it would beneficial for stereo deck.

I don't think there's any advantage for the preview head, but I guess the machine could have butterfly heads for playback.

 

[Michael Tibes]

In my case I must say that at least emotionally every piece of good analog equipment has been a good investment. I've been using DAWs for over 20 years and since the beginning of that time the promise has always been that it (the plugin, the DAW, the whatever) sounds like analog. In my experience this promise has never been fulfilled. No plugin sounds like a 1073, a 2254, a V76, a Cranesong. For me digital works great as a recording media and for tasks analog can't do. But contrary to the recent trend that even famous mix engineers go fully digital, I am actually working on using more analog devices in my DAW setup. I am even developing and building analog devices for that. For me it works better: it is more fun, sounds better and gets me better results faster.

Also the resale value of good analog equipment will hopefully still be good in the future. At least every good piece of analog equipment in working condition does still have a value. I wish I could sell all the plugins I have bought during the past two decades that I don't use any more...

Michael