I was on my way to a studio in Stockholm.
The owner told me had a "classic British sound"
I was interested to find out what he meant.

Acccess to the control roon was via the studio.
In addition to a good selection of new and vintage
German mics, and a fine model B Bluthner grand piano,
I noticed a number of Reslo ribbon mics, and a
Premier drum kit. Was that what he meant by the
"classic British sound"? The answer was in the control
room - a pristine pair of Lockwood Major monitors
driven by a Quad 520f amplifier.

Lockwood (a firm of cabinet makers in
Harrow, UK) built speaker cabinets which they
fitted withTannoy 15 Golds, for studio use in the
days before Tannoy had its own professional division.

The Quad 520f (f = floating) is a studio version
of the type 606 current dumping amplifier, with
a sturdier PSU, balanced line inputs on XLR,
and output protection to prevent DC reaching the
speakers in a fault condition. Aparently the BBC had
some but otherwise they don't seem to be very
common.

We listened to some material currently in production,
and I complemented the owner on his excellent choice
of monitoring.

He told me that he had gone to an audio auction
to buy some large mic tripods. There were four
of these, 2 K+M mic stands, and a teachest full
of assorted mic cables, most of which had original
"saddle" Cannon connectors. He bought the job
lot for a very modest sum. When he got back
to base and took out the cables for testing and
closer inspection, he was surprised to find at the
bottom of the teachest a pair of Koss Pro4 headphones
(not working) and the Quad 520f amp.
Quite a find!

Iain