1 — Introduction
Welcome to a little Abbey Road brilliance.
Throughout the ‘60s there were a number of small boxes dotted around Abbey Road, which
were simply known as ‘Brilliance’ or ‘Presence’ boxes. In this era, engineers were looking
for ways of adding presence to their recordings, especially in popular music. Enter the
Brilliance boxes: these simple passive equalizers were portable versions of the grey
RS127s that were rack-mounted into the studio control room patchbays. They were
designed to give Abbey Road recording engineers additional frequencies that were not
found on the EMI REDD studio mixing desks of the time.
Meet Lester
Lester Smith is a technical engineer at Abbey Road and, amongst other things, is the
custodian of our vintage equipment and microphone collection.
In recent years, while working on various Beatles and John Lennon-related mix projects,
Lester introduced me to these little boxes. My assistants Mirek Stiles and Sam O’Kell had
observed that, in various ‘60s setup sheets, the prevailing EQ was marked as “RS127”. This
equalizer was the 127th item made in-house by EMI for the Recording Sector. Keen to try
these, Lester blew 40 years of dust from some of the boxes and wired them into our
patchbay via the old ‘Siemens’ connectors and presto – instant zing! The large cut and
boost control made it very easy to hear an immediate presence. Put simply – they’re
brilliant!
The Sixties were an adventurous period in our history. Rule books were put aside and
considerable experimentation by engineers helped shape ways and means of producing
sounds not heard before. Following this spirit of experimentation, our latest plug-in suite
provides today’s engineer and musician with a bundle of little boxes straight from this era.
The green and grey RS127s have identical circuits and controls. The grey has a chrome
rack handle that made it convenient to plug into the control room patch-bays. There were
usually two of these in each room, but due to their popularity additional EQ was often
needed, and so stand-alone boxes were made to achieve this. These were painted green.
Because of their portability, they were often used throughout the studio complex; not just in
the studios themselves but also in the mastering, transfer and post-production rooms.
The RS127 is well documented in the highly recommended “Recording The Beatles” book
(Kevin Ryan & Brian Kehew, Curvebender Publishing, 2006) which also refers to the
change in line level and EMI standard impedance that has taken place since the early
Sixties. By happy accident, when comparing the green and grey units, we heard a dramatic
difference when one of them was passed through an EMI interfacing transformer. The
transformer “effect” exaggerated the EQ curves.
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