Musician, producer and mixing engineer Jyrki ‘Speedy’ Saarinen installed an Audient ASP4816 mixing desk in his Helsinki studio last summer as part of a renovation project. Replacing an old console, the arrival of the new Audient at Mediagents ensured Speedy and the rest of the team could continue creating music for tv series and making records for independent labels.
“ASP4816 is a nice console, especially for its size and price.”
Speedy splits his time equally between his studio and working for Finnish National Broadcasting Company, YLE. Here he has mixed and recorded hundreds of different events for them over the years – everything from music festivals to sport events, for broadcast on TV and radio. He even mixed for the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki, the first surround sound broadcast in Eurovision history! Given all that, there is no question that he knows his way around a console.
So when choosing gear for his own studio, he had a very clear idea of what he was after. “We needed an analogue console for recording and especially for mixing. We searched the market for the alternatives and noticed that ASP4816 fitted our needs well,” he explains. “The Audient signal chain including the EQ’s have turned out to be very useful. They don’t add noise or any other unwanted character. You can run the mixes quite hot and it sounds good.”
“You can run the mixes quite hot and it sounds good.”
Mediagents is a hybrid studio working with both digital and analogue gear. Utilising Pro Tools as the main DAW, all mixes go through the analogue summing in the ASP4816, with the addition of traditional outboard gear as well as a variety of plug-ins. “The bus compression is also used quite often. I find mixing in the analogue domain faster than working just ‘in the box’,” he says.
Speedy’s long and diverse career in the audio industry started straight after his audio recording education back in the 1980s. Having impressed 90 million Eurovision viewers in 2007, freelanced as a music producer and worked for 16 years as a monitor engineer on the main stage at the Pori Jazz festival – one of the oldest in Europe – he has managed to earn the trust and respect of many.
“[The EQs] don’t add noise or any other unwanted character”
When the ASP4816 came to the attention of local audio school Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, of course they came to Speedy. “Metropolia asked for my opinion and I was happy to recommend it. ASP4816 is a nice console, especially for its size and price.” [Thank you, that is much appreciated! ~ Audient]
“I’m very lucky to have enjoyed such a varied career. I’m very thankful for YLE that it’s been possible for me to do a lot of different things,” he says.
Visit Mediagents at their website and keep up to date with what they’re up to via Facebook. Audient wishes them all the best!
