Manchester’s SSR has rebranded as Spirit Studios and undertaken an extensive upgrade that includes four of Audient’s flagship ASP8024 Heritage Edition mixing consoles. The move marks ‘nearly 40 years of success and renowned expertise in audio engineering’, according to Head of Marketing, Adrian Greensides.
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,’ Greensides says. ‘We have ten studios here, with a mix of items – some postproduction. Essentially, Audient desks feature now more than any other.
‘Analogue desks are vital for helping students understand signal flow in the physical environment, and then how that relates to digital workflows,’ he continues. ‘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.’
‘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 analogue desk,’ says Music Producer/tutor, Deni Pavlovic. ‘The sound is quite clean and the addition of the master bus compression and transformer circuitry at the final output offer more choice in creating different tonal textures. Also, the desk’s system architecture and layout is very logical and easy to understand.’
‘It looks and feels great,’ Greensides says of the ASP8024-HE aesthetic. ‘The meter flip is cool, the bus routing is really well laid out and the bus compressor is a really nice touch. 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 analogue consoles over the course of a year: ‘The studios are already in demand and active use,’ the ASP8024-HE aesthetic says. ‘Audient will be a key brand for many students, for many years to come.’
Spirit Studios was originally set up as a recording studio in 1980, servicing the needs of bands from the North West such as 808 State, The Smiths and The Stone Roses. Recognising a demand for professionally trained sound engineers in the music industry, the operation then became the first audio engineering and music production school in the UK in 1984.
‘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,’ Greensides reflects. ‘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.’
