History

The Studio 33, now situated in Spain, near the Airport of Palma de Mallorca, was first located in Hamburg/Germany, under the name of Star Studio. It was designed by Chips Davis, Las Vegas, who had built and designed the first LEDE (live end dead end) control room in April 1978, the concept evolving out of Dick Heyser’s TDS (Time Delay Spectrometry), Don Davis’s and Chips’s work on early reflections, Dr. „Puddle“ Rogers’s work in Pinna Transformations and Sound Reproduction and the psychoacoustic fusion of common signal imaging.
To meet with the LEDE requirements the control room had to be built with the precision of a watchmaker: the room had to be 100 percent symmetrical, with the basic geometry having been marked out by laser! Very close tolerances in the specified dimensions – even in the basic structure – had to be kept, the complete wiring optimised, the audio system assembled piece by piece to ensure phase continuity and freedom of earth problems. So, after a long period of arduous work the first studio in Europe with a certified LEDE control room finally saw the light of day in March 1984 and the first producers came in for recordings and testmixes.
LEDE is still quite new in Europe and our customers had to get used to the new possibilities and dimensions of sound this acoustic design offers, in the beginning they often just did not dare to use the full range of power, fearing that, when leaving the control room and hearing their mix on different equipment, it would blow the mix. Quite the contrary: mixes and recordings that leave our LEDE control room remain absolutely identical to what could be heard in the control itself, the proportion of the mixes never changes.
Here we would like to quote Terry Nelson, who visited us to write an article on STUDIO 33 for Studio-Sounds „Studiofile“ of August 1985:
„The system is extremely powerful and allows plenty of headroom for peaks. I played with a multitrack recording of an orchestra with no EQ, going from soft to very loud. The balance and tonal quality of the mix remained identical, meaning that the room was not being excited in a way to produce colorations and that the monitoring was being consistent over the power range used. In short: it worked …“

In the meantime the quality of the STUDIO 33 has attracted a large clientele and only one year after the opening, STUDIO 33 had the first No.1 hit with international success: You’re my heart, you’re my soul, by Modern Talking.