Four of Audient’s flagship ASP8024 Heritage Edition consoles were installed at the educational facility, SSR recently. This comes as part of an overall studio upgrade which neatly coincides with the SSR rebrand as Spirit Studios. Coming into effect this week, this return to SSR Manchester’s roots in name, celebrates its “nearly 40 years of success and renowned expertise in audio engineering,” according to Head of Marketing, Adrian Greensides.
“Audient will be a key brand for many students, for many years to come”
The new Audient consoles join a classic ASP8024 which has been helping SSR to teach industry and degree standard courses within the creative industries over the years. “To embrace this new stage of our history, Spirit Studios has welcomed a number of exciting changes and upgrades, including replacing many of its studio consoles with brand new Audient ASP8024-HE desks, creating brand new classroom facilities for music business, along with our usual annual upgrades of software,” confirms Adrian.
“We have ten studios here, with a mix of items – some post production. Essentially, Audient desks feature now more than any other.” He goes on to explain the importance of teaching both analogue and digital as part of the courses. “Analogue desks are vital for helping students understand signal flow in the physical environment, and then how that relates to digital workflows. Audient desks, especially our new Audient ASP8024 Heritage Edition desks, are very intuitive at doing this. Students learn fast and can apply it to their own setups when producing in a DAW at home. This is particularly important for our Electronic Music students, to have the opportunity to use desks – many for the very first time.”
Deni Pavlovic, Music Producer & tutor at Spirit Studios concurs. “Being trained in operating analogue equipment properly, makes the student perceive it as less intimidating and complicated, as well as enabling them to compare the platforms and draw the conclusions about sonic differences, especially when mixing and summing the signals using an analogue desk.
“the bus routing is really well laid out and the bus compressor is a really nice touch.”
“The sound is quite clean and the addition of the master bus compression and transformer circuitry at the final output offers more choice in creating different tonal textures. Also, the desk’s system architecture and layout is very logical and easy to understand,” he says of the Audients.
Adrian appreciated the ASP8024-HE aesthetic from the start. “It looks and feels great,” he adds. “The meter flip is cool, the bus routing is really well laid out and the bus compressor is a really nice touch.”
“the addition of the master bus compression and transformer circuitry at the final output offers more choice in creating different tonal textures”
So the consoles have certainly got off to an excellent start, with both staff and students’ feedback being very positive. “Our students certainly appreciate the new desks and what they can offer. It has been a very smooth transition.” An estimated 300 students will get their hands on these new Audient analogue consoles over the course of a year and according to Adrian: “The studios are already in demand and active use,” which is definitely a good sign. “Audient will be a key brand for many students, for many years to come.”
Spirit Studios originally set up as a recording studio back in 1980, servicing the needs of bands from the North West such as 808 State, The Smiths and The Stone Roses. Seeing a gap in the market, they recognised an increase in demand for professionally trained sound engineers in the music industry, and by 1984 became the first audio engineering and music production school in the UK.
So how does Adrian see the future of Spirit Studios? “We have long been renowned for producing music and audio, but the future means looking deeper still from the lens of the producer and continuing to build on our already high quality education. We already offer Music Business, but will always look to the future of providing courses that offer wider learning and understanding for tomorrow’s producer. Audient will help us to do just that”.
Audient is very pleased to be a part of Spirit Studios’ ongoing success.
