Winchester Audio Barn
Less than an hour from London, the Winchester Audio Barn has designed by a world-renowned acoustician, a master technician and a dreamer to be ‘where vintage soul meets modern sound’, and may be the only recording studio in the world to share space within a purpose-built complex that includes an event venue, restaurant/bar, and a classic car showroom and workshop.
Opened in autumn 2025 in the Hampshire countryside, the studio is the work of VDC Trading founder Niall Holden, manufacturer of Van Damme Cable, a industry-leading brand that is widely used in both the music and live worlds.
When John Harris and Jody Elff recruited to engineer the recording of CBS’ One Last Time: An Evening with Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga shortly before Bennett announced his retirement from live performance, they immediately understood the musical and cultural significance of the event.
The growing popularity of gaming is seeing audio facilities flourish – particularly under the global pandemic and lockdowns. One such, G4F in the French city of Angoulême, ranks among Europe’s leading gaming production houses.
Our thirst for bringing the saturation characteristics of analogue audio electronics and magnetic tape to digital audio recording continues seemingly unsated. Almost every week brings word of a new ‘saturation’ plug-in of some kind, summoning the distortion found in old recordings to add to new ones.
From the winds that blow through the freezing Romanian Carpathian Mountains to the sounds of the searing heat of Ethiopia’s deserts, Romanian sound recordist George Vlad has taken a childhood love of sound, and built an expansive career in location recording.
With Bettina Bertók-Thumm and Michael Thumm taking ownership in 2017, Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg has entered a new phase in its history. Both German and international artists record here – Udo Jürgens, Herbert Grönemeyer, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan and Miles Davis among them.
As a Tyrell Corporation Nexus-6 replicant, Blade Runner’s Roy Batty had a predetermined life span of just four years – and he wanted it extended. Remonstrations with his creator, Eldon Tyrell, brought only the commiseration that he had ‘burned so very, very brightly’.
US microphone manufacturer Telefunken Elektroakustik is marking 20 years – founded by Toni Fishman in 2001, it represents the twenty-first century revival of the original German company founded in 1903, and faithfully follows a tradition of excellence and innovation established more than100 years ago.
The very first synthesiser I owned was a Moog. And my second; and my third. I still have two of them, a Micromoog and Minimoog, but sold the third, an Opus 3, to help fund a Jupiter 8. Somehow, along the way, I’d borrowed an ARP Axxe and an Octave Cat, and would dearly have loved to get my hands on the Minimoog’s early contemporary, an ARP Odyssey.
Maurice Genevoix has joined luminary French writers Voltaire, Rousseau, Dumas, Hugo, and Malraux, and revered figures from culture, science, and politics in France’s secular temple, the Panthéon.
The completion of a US$26m restoration at the 150-year-old Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston gave New England-based integrator Commlink the opportunity to showcase its prowess with wireless in worship spaces.
In its opening moments, Sound of Metal feels like a ‘rockumentary’ with the band performing on stage, moving on to the next gig in their motor home and working in the recording studio. But music quickly takes a back seat in the story, as the drummer’s hearing fails.
Television is a visual medium that, without sound, makes little or no sense. Surveys show that viewers are more forgiving of lower-quality pictures – increasingly common in the YouTube era – than of poor, loud or distorted audio. Because of this, comprehensive monitoring and analysis of broadcast sound, complying with technical and regulatory standards, is essential.