The Fairchild 670 Stereo Compressor

I’ve been banging on to anybody that will listen, as is quite the norm, about how amazing it is: “we hired a Fairchild!”. Mostly the response has been “a what?” and that is entirely my fault for not being selective enough in picking my unmetered ravings’ recipients.

So then, us Honey Ants went into the studio at the beginning of September to record an EP. Found a lovely place called Blue Pro Studios in North London. Had a great time recording, using some beautiful gear: a Neumann M147, a Universal Audio 2-610 pre, EMI Chandler Abbey Road TG12345 EQ and loads of other stuff. Nice feeling being surrounded by gear like that.

One day, James (previous keys player and current bass player) and I were peeking through the door window on the ground floor.

I went in and got chatting to a lovely French chap whose name escapes me, and possibly him too. Anyhow, this was I believe FX rentals (or Funky Junk, but possibly not). This chap gave us a tour and me-oh-my was there some wonderful stuff down there.

We were introduced to both the very desk that was used to record The Lord Of The Rings soundtracks on (“one desk to rule them all”), and also a whole other bunch of beautiful Neves. Not least of which was installed in their studio, owned by none other than Kate Bush.

(more photos of this place on Flickr)

Suffice to say there was lots of interesting gear and it got me thinking.

That tape machine, used by Pink Floyd when they made Dark Side Of The Moon (I’m sure that’s what he said), maybe we could hire that? Everybody knows tape sounds better, and my plan was to get our recordings out of the digital realm and onto tape (and back to digital again). The Arcade Fire did this with The Suburbs, as written about in Sound on Sound recently.

Turns out, hiring any tape machine in that building, plus the cost of tape, was prohibitively expensive, running into hundreds of pounds. <cry> Well, the guys at Blue Pro said they had a Fairchild downstairs, so why don’t we hire that? It’s just been repaired and will sound “better than tape”. Well, I’m not sure about better, “different” is more appropriate I’d say, but nevertheless, a Fairchild! I’d read about these on gearslutz.com, seen the various plugin versions and opinions of the pros, saying how amazing they are.

So hire it we did:

Isn’t it a thing of beauty? Built in the 1950s and you wouldn’t get much change from £25,000 if you bought one. We were under strict instruction to let it warm up for at least 20 minutes before using, and my word it didn’t half warm up. 14 transformers (whatever they do), and 20 valves (they make stuff sound good). It actually ran hot.

And it made everything sound amazing. With just 1 or 2db of compression our mixes became thicker, more “present”, and more musical sounding. Like pouring gold onto it, everything just sings. I dare say that the average ear may not appreciate the differences brought by the Fairchild, especially given the quality of consumer speakers and headphones, but through those enormous monitors in the control room, the difference was like a smack in the face.

So I went right out and bought T-Racks Deluxe Edition, which includes a Fairchild 670 plugin. Which looks like this:

I’ve not really got to know it properly yet, maybe I’ll post some audio files up here in the future and we can all hear the difference. Mind you, some guys have already done that.

Anyway, this post is a bit of a rambling from an enthusiast, but I was very happy with our final masters for our EP, all of which went through the real thing. Knowing this makes me feel, much like the sound imparted by the tubes of the Fairchild itself, warm and fuzzy.

Further Reading

More about the Fairchild 670:
http://www.uaudio.com/webzine/2003/september/text/content4.html

And for the technically-minded:
http://mixonline.com/online_extras/fairchild-datasheet.pdf