From small acorns…

SSL was founded by a young self-taguht engineer called Colin Sanders, and originally produced control systems for church pipe organs. However, the team at SSL were also very much into music and recording, and the company you know today as SSL stemmed from the studio that Colin built in a small Oxfordshire village called Stonesfield. He named the studio Acorn Studios, and if you google it you’ll find a number of albums that were recorded there.

However, when he looked around for a recording console Colin could not find one that did what he wanted; to control a tape machine, to use computer technology to control the mixer, and to have really good routing and ergonomics. So being the sort that he was, Colin decided to design and build his own. The first one was built in a very fetching shade of blue and was named after the studio – Acorn. So, imagine our surprise when a friend of SSL from Germany got in touch to say that he had one of the channel modules from the Acorn console, and did we want it? Oh Yes! Duly shipped across was serial number 15 – a channel module from the first ever console Colin designed, and the only one not to be called an SSL. I’ve posted a couple of pics in the attached gallery, and the eagle-eyed amongst you might recognise a couple of things that eventaully became standard SSL sonic features: auto-attack dynamics, Bus Compressor-like release and ratios (the circuit in the channel compressors was originally a mono version of the Bus Comp), clear coloured knobs arranged in a sensible fashion, in fact many of the hallmarks of the SSLs of today.

 

The Acorn console evolved into the SL4000B, which evolved in the the 4000E, and  as they say the rest  is history.

Colin Sanders with the SL400B at the APRS show in 1979

Acorn 411 channel strip with X-Rack module

Acorn 411 mic pre and dynamics

Acorn 411 EQ