Recording - January 2015 - 32

B Y PA U L V N U K J R .

Chandler Limited

REDD.47 Abbey Road Tube Mic Preamp
A slice of recording history in your processing rack... for real

In the history of recording consoles,
few other audio desks are as shrouded in
romance, mystery, and desire as the
Abbey Road/EMI Studios REDD.51. Two
of these valve-based desks were used in
Abbey Road Studios in the 1960s. Only
three were ever built, and only one is
known to exist today; it's housed in Mark
Knopfler's British Grove Studios in the UK.
From the last few sessions for With The
Beatles in 1963 through 1968's White
Album, every Beatles session at Abbey
Road was tracked and mixed on the
REDD.51 desk. That run ended in 1969,
when the studio installed the new solidstate TG Series desk used on the band's
final opus, Abbey Road.
Since REDD desks were built in-house
and only for use in EMI-owned facilities,
for the last 45 years engineers young and
old could merely dream of tracking and
mixing through a REDD of any sort. With
the birth of the Abbey Road plug-in line a
few years back, we were able to get part
of the way there and roleplay that we were
dressed in white lab coats, wandering the
halls of EMI Studios and pushing up our
virtual Painton Quadrant faders, but the
sound of the hardware remained largely
elusive save for a few small defunct boutique and DIY companies... until now!
As we described in our October 2014
review of the TG2-500, Chandler Limited of
Shell Rock, Iowa, has a 13-year history
building and releasing microphone preamps, EQs, and compressors based on the
aforementioned Abbey Road/EMI TG Series
desk. Thanks to its ongoing partnership with
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RECORDING January 2015

Abbey Road, Chandler Limited is now moving into recreating the earlier tube-based
fare, and it all starts with the Chandler
REDD.47 tube microphone preamp.
Some history
The REDD.47 was/is the line amplifier
component of the REDD.51 desk. It was built
to replace the modified Telefunken/Siemensmade V72 amplifiers used in the previous
REDD.37 desks, the ones used for the
Beatles' first album and part of the second.
The REDD.47 was developed and built
by EMI's "Record Engineering Development
Department" or REDD for short. While it
was created as a replacement for the V72,
the REDD.47 was a from-scratch design;
Chandler's Wade Goeke explains, "they
share no similarities other than they both use
tubes." For the full, fascinating story, I recommend Recording The Beatles by Kevin
Ryan and Brian Kehew.
Before we move on to Chandler's take
on this mythological beast, let's look back
at the original modules. Unlike today's
rackmount mic preamps, the modular
styles used by AMS Neve, or the ubiquitous 500 Series API modules that offer all
of their controls on the front panel, the
line amplifiers in the REDD desks were
small rectangular selfcontained modules
with few to no controls on them at all.
They popped into the sides of the REDD
desks, where they controlled gain levels
for every input and output on the desk,
from the microphone inputs to the reverb
sends and more. The REDD.51 desk contained up to forty REDD.47 amplifiers!

Unlike the V72-which was self-powered, hot swappable, and had a fixed
output level with no front side controls-
the REDD.47 drew its power from the
desk and needed the desk to be powered
down to be changed. It contained a 3position Voltage Gain switch with settings
for 34, 40 or 46 dB output levels, and it
also had additional Fine Gain control for
the precise balancing of its many possible
tasks on the desk. This Fine Gain control
was hidden behind a plastic cap and
accessed with a screwdriver. All other
standard channel controls were located
on the desktop, such as further volume
attenuation (which on the REDD.51 was
an additional 0 to -30 dB in 6 dB steps),
a simple bass lift (what we would call a
low cut), reverb chamber sends, basic
panning, EQ, and more.
While the new Chandler REDD.47 is,
on one hand, simply the line amp
REDD.47 of old in a new casing dedicated to the task of microphone preamplification, it is not just a straight port of
the original. The new unit has been fitted
with a few other accoutrements to make
it useful in the modern recording landscape, and also sports some extra
Chandler-centric mojo.
The new REDD.47, outside and in
The Chandler REDD.47 is a 2-space
19" rackmount box dressed in the same
original battleship gray as the original
REDD desks. All of its black knobs, big
and small, are spec for spec re-molds of
those found on the original desks as well.

Recording - January 2015

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