Recording - October 2013 - 80

Sun Studios—Then And Now

Guest editorial by Scott Dorsey

but at lower frequencies it’s very live and
very present. It’s not boomy per se, because
there isn’t just one frequency band where it’s
very reflective—it’s a whole wide range of
low frequencies. This sort of room was very
much the sound of many R&B, rock, and
country albums in the 1950s. It was a very
common acoustic in its day, and it is one
that is almost completely gone today.
In 1952, Sam started the Sun Records
label, recording bands on his full-track
mono Ampex 350 tape machine and cutting discs off those tapes with the Presto. His
skills as a producer and an A&R man turned
out to be astonishing, and at a time and a
place where the Blues was turning into Rock
and Roll, he developed some amazing talent and produced some amazing records.
You could wander into the studio, leave
with a lacquer and a tape, send the lacquer
to a pressing plant and find yourself with a
garage full of records to sell under your

a kid. It’s a sound I haven’t heard in years
and one I never expected to hear again.
Sun is still open as a commercial studio.
Up in the booth is a 1980s vintage Studer
console, a Pro Tools system, and some
neglected-looking tape gear. There are
some electronics packages gutted out of
Ampex recorders presumably being used
for their mic preamp sections. But you don’t
go into a place like Sun because of what’s
in the booth—today, you could bring your
own recording system yourself in a suitcase.
No, you go into a place like Sun for the history and for the sound of the room.
It’s not a natural sound, it’s not a realistic sound. It’s not a room where you’d
ever want to record a full-sized big band
(although I have to admit that I have done
just that in similar rooms when that was
all there was). But it’s a room with a familiar and these days nearly unique sound
that I am glad has been preserved.

n 1950, Sam Phillips had been working
as a disk jockey and engineer for radio
station WLAY in Muscle Shoals, Alabama,
but he saw an opportunity for independent
recording services in Memphis. He opened
up Memphis Recording Service at 706
Union Avenue in Memphis.
Sam Phillips would record anything. If
you had a wedding in a local church,
he’d go out with a portable Magnecord
tape machine and record it. If you had a
song you wanted to record, you could
walk into his studio and cut an acetate
direct to disk on his little Presto lathe that
was originally designed for radio stations
to cut transcription discs.
Sun was one of the first independent studios. It was a cut above the little closetsized recording booths that let servicemen
record a letter to home. But it was a far cry
from the huge rooms with carefully controlled acoustics at RCA and Columbia.
The main studio at Sun was a very small
room by the standards of the day, about 16
x 24 feet. The front and rear wall were
made into W-shaped curves as was the
high ceiling, so sounds would not reflect
directly between them, but the side walls
were parallel. The floor was covered with
very bright-sounding linoleum and the walls
were covered with acoustical tile. Acoustical
tile was a very high-tech new material back
in 1950. It was a fibrous composite material with holes drilled in it, designed to be
very absorptive at high and medium frequencies. It greatly improved intelligibility
and reduced high frequency reverb times in
restaurants and small radio studios.
Now, this sort of studio was very common
at about that time, and many small radio studios were built exactly like this. At high frequencies the room is very dead sounding,
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RECORDING October 2013

own name. Now, Sun wasn’t the only studio doing this—a lot of radio stations were
opening their production studios up to musicians wanting to come in and record, and
many country and rock records were made
at radio stations by touring musicians who
would drop by when they were in town. But
Sun was one of the few studios also running
its own label. If they wanted you in their roster, they’d put your record out. If they didn’t, they’d record you for a fee and let you
put it out yourself.
In 1959, Sun outgrew their studios on
Union Avenue and moved into a larger facility on Madison Avenue with much higher
technology equipment. That facility is open
today under the name Phillips Recording,
but I’d like to talk about the original studios,
which fell into disrepair until they were reopened in 1987 by Gary Hardy.
The Sun studios today are visually and
acoustically very much like they were in
1950, with the original room treatments
and original materials still in place. When
you walk into the room and clap your
hands, you can hear the sound of the small
independent studio of the Fifties. It sounds
like every radio studio I ever worked at as

Sun Studio Memphis is open for tours
from 10 AM to 6 PM and for sessions at
all sorts of times—see sunstudio.com.
There’s a gift shop and a museum upstairs
with some equipment of doubtful provenance (like the photo of Sam Phillips in
front of a Presto lathe, sitting next to an
actual RCA lathe that is a quite different
piece of equipment). Don’t worry about
any of that stuff; go listen to the room. If
you’re an old studio guy you’ll find it very
familiar. If you’re not, just listen.
Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com)
is a recording engineer and lover of all
things audio-historical, living and working
in Williamsburg, VA.

http://www.sunstudio.com

Recording - October 2013

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