Bill Jenkins Sound owner Bill Jenkins has been designing and manufacturing speakers for more than three decades, specialising in high-quality, handcrafted musical instrument speakers, studio subwoofers and large format studio playback and monitoring enclosures. Jenkins’ first studio installations for an unnamed producer was in Record One Recording’s Sherman Oaks facility in LA – having leased Studios A and B from Record One, he gutted both studios and rebuilt the sound systems from scratch.

A mutual friend had rented Jenkins’ subwoofers for the Sherman Oaks studios before the rebuild. After hearing his subwoofers, Jenkins said his client ‘fell in love with them – when it came time to rebuild, he chose me to do both’.

‘I was an engineer on the road for a while, and I did live sound but after supplying my subs to Record One studios, and then being offered the chance to build the mid to highs from the bottom up, I took that as a challenge,’ Jenks says.

The project required Jenkins’ expertise from start to finish, as he fitted each speaker into a foam-lined ‘isobox’ that was then installed into each studio’s front wall as it was being built. The custom installation includes 14 18-inch subwoofers, two sets of four (coupled) 15-inch speaker configurations on the left and right of the centre, plus a set of dual (coupled) 15-inch speakers in the centre.

According to Jenkins, his client regularly monitors at 110-115dB (in 7.1 surround sound) and had by then grown accustomed to blowing out speakers – until Jenkins discovered Powersoft. ‘He’d blow six to eight [speakers] every week,’ he says.

For the renovation, Jenkins discarded the power amps he had previously been using and – knowing his client’s affinity for analogue equipment – paired the custom speaker system with four Powersoft K10 amplifiers (per studio) for both subwoofers and mid-range.

In the time since the installation, Jenkins reports that the ‘record mogul’, who continues to mix at bone-rattling decibel levels, ‘hasn’t blown one subwoofer since – not one’.

‘When we pulled the previous amplifiers out and rewired the rack to accept the K10s, it was a night and day difference,’ he elaborates. ‘It controlled the cones better, and actually used my porting and my speakers way better than the previous amplifiers had.’

While two of the K10s in each room power the subwoofers, the other two are dedicated to the mids. Directly after the switch to K10s, Jenkins noticed, ‘far more intelligibility, and way quicker response in the mids; you hear the wood in the snare’.

Each studio’s rack is located in a separate control room within the Sherman Oaks facility and connects to each studio’s sound system through 65ft of double-twisted, 10-guage speaker wire.

Once the Sherman Oaks renovations were complete, Jenkins continued to put the finishing touches on the sound system until his client took it for a test run: ‘I wasn’t satisfied until the studio was up and running, and I walked in and my client walked up to me with a big grin, and said, “I love your subs”. When he said that, I was satisfied.’

And that’s when Jenkins was called in for a second job – the producer’s home studio...

Located in a bunker 30ft below ground, the studio required ten Powersoft K10 amplifiers – more than the combined amount of Powersoft K10s used in both Record One Studios – to power the system. Jenkins says the producer uses the space primarily for mixing sound on movie projects, while he dedicates the Record One Sherman Oaks studios to making music.

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