"Build quality was one of my first criteria, along with power consumption and, of course, audio quality.”
Several years ago, Olivier Cussac received some devastating news: Studio Condorcet, a legendary recording facility founded near the centre of Toulouse in the 1970s, which he had owned since 2007, had been scheduled for demolition as part of an urban renewal project. Fast forward to January 2025, and Studio Condorcet has been reborn with the launch of a multi-purpose room housing a new Harrison 32Classic 32-channel analogue console, the first of several planned spaces at the new location just outside Toulouse.
Cussac, a multi-instrumentalist, engineer, producer, and film and TV composer, comments, “As a film score composer, I have to work in various musical styles, from orchestral to jazz to electro to every kind of pop, rock and funk styles. As a record producer, I really focus on the intensity in music, no matter the genre. The 32Classic can handle anything; a heavy rock band like Slift, all the way to a fully acoustic project.”
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Studio Condorcet
Studio Condorcet’s large mix room, where Cussac is surrounded by guitars, keyboards and other noise-making devices and offers views of the countryside through a large window next to the console, was acoustically designed by Camille Hamel and Jean Marc Vernaudon to double as a recording space. The high-ceilinged room beyond the front wall is currently being converted into a 430-square-foot tracking space for bands or ensembles of up to 15 musicians.
“I absolutely wanted a brand-new desk,” says Cussac, but he was unfamiliar with the brand’s history or products, other than the Mixbus software. “My interest started to grow when I saw the pedigree of the studios and engineers who used the 32C.” Harrison’s 32C, introduced in 1975, played an integral part in the production of hit records by the likes of Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Supertramp, Michael Jackson, and many others. Cussac also had a checklist: “Build quality was one of my first criteria, along with power consumption and, of course, audio quality.”
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