David Richardson (audio engineer & music producer

David Richardson (born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire) is an English music producer, audio engineer and musician. In 1968 he founded Sky Studios with rock band Jethro Tull, the studio later became leading facilities house, Sound Recording Technology (SRT).^[1]

History

Richardson learned piano from the age of four and developed a passion for electronics and sound recording. By his teens, he was already recording top Jazz artists of the day; this included names such as, Kathy Stobart and Ian Carr, as a young producer he had production contracts with major labels like CBS (now Sony Music) and George Martin's Air label, distributed by EMI. Apart from early roots in Jazz and Rock Music he also produced Pop records with artists that included Jet Harris and The Tornados and at the peak of their TV success, in the early 1980s he co-wrote and produced Cannon and Ball's Rock On Tommy album, receiving a Silver disc.

Manufacturing

In the mid-1980s, he started a record factory in St Ives, Cambridgeshire with business partner George Bellamy (former Tornado and father of Matt Bellamy of rock band Muse). As an engineer he became interested and specialised in process control as a challenge set to him by RCA (now Sony Music), he created a method to produce a perfect five-piece extrusion moulding; the first perfectly playable audio Picture Disc. At this point no one had been able to create discs within a constant tolerance and without severe warping. In this procedure he was the first engineer to incorporate fuzzy logic into the process control of the Record Press, by building his own logic controllers, thus he achieved RCA's quality goal helping the factory to gain further substantial clients like Virgin and Island, the new system produced many very collectible chart-topping products, ranging from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Eurhythmics and Boy George.

Mastering

After vinyl started to decline, David turned his passions towards Digital Audio. Inspired by his experience in cutting the master acetate discs for vinyl record manufacturing, he became interested in developing Mastering for Compact Disc. One observation he made was that many people were transferring analogue tapes raw to digital, not realising the cutting engineer in the past would have added EQ compression and even reverb to the final disc cut. He found the using his skills as a producer and recording engineer he could add the final audio touch to the Digital Masters, his work on rapidly became a big success and the Audio facility grew to contain six studios. He was one of the first people in the world, in the mid 1990s, to use 32-Bit Digital EQ, David created the audio for a wide range of back catalogue and made a new success of many older recordings, some of which included the chart topping album One Step Beyond and the biggest selling Jazz CD of the 1990s, Jazz on a Summer's Day, this made new hits of tracks like as Take Five and The Girl from Ipanema. Being an engineer at the start of the digital audio revolution his work, plus the training of many technicians made a contribution towards establishing the present importance of Audio Mastering, now a standard embellishment process, for most commercial audio products and in particular CD Audio.

Classical recordings

In addition to his work on commercial audio products he was also a leader in creation of the first 20-bit recordings and an early exponent of Sony's SBM Noise Shaping; with a team of staff under his supervision he recorded over 120 high bit classical albums with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, working with some of the world’s leading performers and conductors, such as the late Yehudi Menuhin and Sir Charles Mackerras. The narration for Peter and The Wolf was produced by Richardson and recorded in London with the actor Sir John Gielgud. Sound Recording Technology's classical team recorded the RPO series on its own Mitsubishi 20-bit reel-to-reel machines in many locations, including CTS Studios in Wembley, Watford Town Hall, Abbey Road and at SRT's own studios in Edison Road, St Ives, Cambridgeshire. Each of the recordings were subject to 20-bit Sadie music editing, plus 32-bit sound enhancements. The final outstanding recordings received critical acclaim in the leading classical publication The Gramophone and most of the recordings are still widely available. In 1997, he and his music team collaborated with Buckingham Palace to produce the official recording to commemorate the decommissioning of HMY Britannia. The recording was of British music performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Carl Davis; it includes material such as "Coronation Scot", "Jerusalem" and "Rule, Britannia!". The production team included, Music Producer; Matthew Dilley, Location Sound Recordist; Richard Millard, Editor; Andrew Lang and David Richardson who was executive producer. The final edited 20-bit master was treated with 32-bit sound processing and then scaled to the final master using a new format at the time, HDCD.

Present

Richardson left Sound Recording Technology in 1999 taking a break from the music industry and for a time hosted a late night chat show on Central Radio in Southern Spain where he lived for a number of years. He is now back in the industry mastering music for CD and Audio for Video, in 2008 among many projects he created a new 5.1 surround soundtrack for the original cult series The Prisoner, which was re-released having been visually restored from the original film footage. Richardson is Managing Director of Chapel Kensington^[2] an Audio Video Post facility. Sound Recording Technology in St Ives Cambridgeshire closed in September 2010, however; Chapel Kensington have purchased assets that include the domain brand name.

References

↑ Paul Gilby visits SRT Records & Tapes October 1986
↑ Chapel Kensington