In the heart of Soho stands a very special studio. Dean St. Studios is one of the last professional-level large-format recording studios in Central London.

The premises were originally used in the 1950’s as a film studio, but its musical history truly began when the studio became Zodiac Studios, and later Good Earth Studios, when legendary producer Tony Visconti bought it and changed the name.

Tony Visconti has been described as one of the most important producers in the history of rock, and he recorded music legends such as David Bowie,T-Rex, Thin Lizzy, U2, and so many others. As well as that, artists, including Tina Turner, Wham!, The Smiths and Duran Duran, would also hire out the studios independently to record.

In 1989, Visconti sold the lease to music production company Joe & Co. who developed some of the premises into music recording and production suites, however they left Visconti’s original control room and studio unaltered. Jasmin Lee, daughter of Alvin Lee of 10 Years After, took over the studio in 2007. She wanted to keep much of the original control room and studio but needed to bring it up to date through refurbishment.  VA were asked to carry out refurbishments as 30 years previous, VA designed and built a recording studio for Alvin at his Buckinghamshire home, the renowned Hook End Studios.

Since opening in 2007, Dean St. has been used by many artists including Adele, Kaiser Chiefs, Tom Odell, Ed Sheeran, Paul Weller, Paloma Faith, Florence + The Machine, Robert Plant, Noel Gallagher, Miles Kane & The Wanted.

Challenges:

Maintain original fixtures

Lead time

Location (basement)

Veale Associates were given just 6 weeks to economically redesign and refurbish the main studio and improve the acoustics. Wall coverings were changed and silver laminate accents added to give a more modern look. A solid oak floor was fitted along with a twinkling star cloth ceiling feature.

The adjacent control room was updated with state of the art equipment including an SSL Duality and a new inter-connecting window installed to improve isolation between the spaces.

In 2020 Jasmin invited VA to take the Studio 1 Control Room to the next level, transforming it into the first independent Dolby Atmos Music Mixing studio in the UK – Auraferix.

Studio 1 now offers a mirror of the Dolby Atmos mix room installed at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, with a 9.4.4 configured PMC speaker installation.

The revamped Studio features PMC’s flagship IB2S XBD-A active monitors covering left and right main channels, an IB2S-A for the centre channel, 10 discrete Wafer2 loudspeakers for surround and height channels and four sub2 subwoofers.

The install at Dean St, Studios exceeds the standard Dolby requirements, allowing artists’ audio spanning across all genres of music to be delivered consistently in Dolby Atmos.