Grammy-winning engineer and legendary audio equipment designer Rupert Neve has died at the age of 94. His legacy as one of the most important and influential studio and recording equipment designers cannot be overstated. Tributes have flooded in from the wider music industry including from Above & Beyond, El-P, engineer Alex Tumay, The 1975, Paul Epworth, Daddy Kev, Nigel Godrich, Abbey Road Studios and many more.
He designed the first-ever transistor-based EQ, followed by the first transistor-based console, installed in Phillips Studios in London in 1964. Up until that point, consoles were powered with vacuum tubes – or valves – rather than transistors. Neve’s design offered a new sound and stability. He was then commissioned by Wessex Sound Studio to create the first 24-channel console in London, which equipped his now-classic 1073 mic pre and EQ channel strips. Those 1073 strips are possibly Neve’s greatest legacy, still sought-after today in hardware form and modelle