How did you end up with a Sphere console?
This console came from Nashville to Echo Park's Studio B here in Bloomington in the '90s. Echo Park was the big pro studio here when I came to Bloomington for college. They closed its doors for good about nine years ago.
Yeah, very well known.
It was owned by Mike Wanchic [John Mellencamp's guitarist], and Mark Hood [MX-80 Sound, John Scofield, Mellencamp]. When I was a first-year IU [Indiana University Bloomington] audio engineering student in '99, we took a tour and I saw the Sphere for the first time and was completely mesmerized. Eleven years later, in 2010, Mark was closing the B Room and was selling the Sphere. I had a month of unbooked studio time, so I bought the console and called Greg Norman [Tape Op #87] from Electrical Audio to come in and commission the desk.
He's awesome!
He is! He's coming back next week to do some tech work. The biggest challenge of installing the desk was getting it into the studio. In fact, we have a window in our control room thanks to that console. The console's frame is one huge piece, so it wouldn't fit through the doors. We had to remove the entire exterior facing wall of the control room, and the movers backed the truck right up to the floor. My buddy, Pete Schreiner, who built the studio with me in the summer of 2008 in between his Magnolia Electric Company tours, tore down the wall that morning, and as soon as the console was loaded in he put up a brand-new exterior wall and added a glass block window while he was at it – all in one day!
That's insane.
Yeah. If I did it now, I'd put two double doors there and hide them behind drywall.
Did you install the Sphere and get it up and running as it was?
Yeah. And it worked, surprisingly. But it had seen a lot of modifications over the years before I got it. I'm fairly certain it's the first console Sphere made after Electrodyne closed shop. In fact, the console's internal wiring was all labeled "Electrodyne." The console was commissioned by Bob Beckham for his publishing house, Combine Music; they were responsible for writing a ton of country hits in the '70s and early '80s. This was the console in his writer's studio, so no hits were recorded on it, but hundreds of hits were written and demoed on it. There were less than 60 Sphere consoles ever made, and most of them were parted out later on. Based on my research, I discovered that before the Eclipse Type A consoles, Sphere made a Type I and a Type II. Ours was the only Type II they ever made. I think approximately five Type I consoles were made, and they look a lot like our Type II except they are shallower and more than twice as wide. The Type I and II were designed right before the in-line console concept became the standard, so on the Type II, the whole left section is tape returns and EQs, and the whole right section is mic preamps, sends, and such. Honestly, at least for today's modern studio, the Type I is a pain in the ass because they take up too much room and are hard to navigate. Also, the Type I and II came with Sphere's proprietary Mix Log, an early mix recall system that used a series of tones that would be sent from the board to the head of your multitrack tape on mixdown, going through hundreds of relays. Then you would play those tones back through the console during your next mixing session and set all of the levels on each channel to read zero on the meters to recall your previous mix settings. It was a total electronic and maintenance nightmare, and it would fall out of calibration, add noise to the desk, and took hours to set up. You might as well just start a new mix at that point! The Mix Log circuitry was all removed by Mike Stucker when he was the tech for Echo Park. When I got the desk, it still had the huge Mix Log panel. I had no idea what that was until I started digging into the history. Anyway, after Greg and I spent a week installing the desk it was working well enough to do sessions. I then recapped every module. These old boards are awesome because everything's modular, which makes them really easy to work on.
You can always see the parts clearly.
It seems so intimidating when you don't know anything about these giant desks, but then you crack it open and you're like, "Oh, there's the mic preamp card, there's an EQ module, output amp cards, and summing amps." That's it. But the control room monitor board was a breadboarded, point-to-point nightmare. It was insane looking, and it was intermittent. Despite my tech's recommendation to leave it alone, I decided to recap it anyway, and surprisingly it worked. In 2012, we did a substantial round of modifications with Mike Stucker, who had first commissioned and modified the desk as Echo Park's tech in the early '90s. In 1999 he became a professor at the IU Audio Department – I was actually in his first class – and now he's the department chair of the IU Audio Engineering and Sound Production program at Jacobs School of Music. The Sphere had a lot of sentimental value for Mike since it was his first big console project, so he donated about 40 hours of his time when I bought it. We moved the pan pots, which were at the very back by the bus assignments, up to the front above the faders. Any time I wanted to pan anything I had to reach across the whole desk, and the speakers were behind my head. I couldn't even tell where I was panning to! We also added quasi-in-line functionality to the desk with fader flip and some other features. That project took longer than expected and had some gremlins because he was working with the existing wiring and electronics, which had already been messed with many times over the years. I still had all these other modifications I wanted to do that we'd talked about for years, including building outboard preamps with all these original spare Sphere m1200b preamp cards and SPA50 output cards I had. So, Stucker and I built and racked these nice, over-the-top four channel Sphere preamps, essentially recreating the signal path of a channel strip from the console, but we added all the features I wished the console had. The console's original design had the mic preamp at max gain, fully open, and there was one button to take the gain down -15 dB, and a second button that was a -30 dB input pad. That's all.
That's it? No input knob?
No, but there's an output gain control. If you're clipping the input, you have the -15 dB gain option. And if it's still too hot, you have the -30 dB pad, and then you can control your level to tape using the output gain.
There's not much wiggle room there.
No, but you learn a lot about gain structure working on a preamp like that! For the outboard preamps we designed, we added a 12-step input gain switch, polarity flip, 12-segment LED meters, a switch to tap a secondary impedance winding on the original mic input transformers (that had never been utilized in the console), and more. It was like, "Wow, this is how the console preamps should be." When the Sphere was still at Combine Music, Fred Hill, who's a famous Nashville tech, had worked on the console at some point in the IC era, and he added all these NE5044 op-amp chips as summing amps and actively balanced the line inputs. It sounded fine, but it lacked headroom. The original console was entirely discrete, with each active stage using John Hall's brilliant SPA50/60 op-amp, which is the true sound of the Sphere console and has tons of headroom. I had all of the original documents for our desk and brought them with me when I visited Ken Hirsch from Electrodyne, Quad 8, and Orphan Audio [Tape Op #74]. We dug through the schematics, and he solved all these mysteries about the console's past. He's like, "Well, your board should have this and this. All this other stuff isn't original." The original console didn't have phantom power or polarity switches, and had very limited routing, but its original discrete topology was far superior to the older modifications that had been done. So, I called Stucker and said, "I want to add these features, but to revert back to the original summing amps." He replied, "Well, if you're doing that we might as well put the preamps that we built for those outboard versions in the board." Then that snowballed into designing a whole new console and adding tons of new features to it. As we were designing the new console, I was asked to design the studio No Fun Club in Winnipeg, where we made the Deerhoof record.
