EQS Learning

Hi,A friend renletcy reminded me that I worked at Neve in the late 70s and early 80s, so I started surfing and came across your site. Mike Oldfield's 8108 was the last console I worked on as a test engineer in the test dept. before becoming one of Neve's technical writers. I then wrote the user guide for the 8108 as more orders came in for them. Because there was no callout staff available one morning, I got asked to respond to an emergency call from an irate Mike Oldfield to fix his 8108 which wouldn't switch on.I arrived at his house in Denham where he was trying to mix down Crises . After pulling out every channel strip, rack card, you name it it turned out that some bright spark had decided to automatically switch on the aircon system using a spare relay inside the 8108 power supply rack that lived in a small room underneath the studio. The relay didn't like it, so each time someone tried to turn the mixer on, the power supply shut down.Five hours after arriving, I had the 8108 back together again, zeroed, and invited Mike to try playing back from the multitrack tape. I watched him grin as he brought the faders up, and was gruffly dismissed.I then gave an 8108 training course to Dutch techies working for NOS in Hilversum, Holland. I can't vouch for the desk's sound, but I found the routing to be confusing, especially as you can't see at a glance which channels are routed to which groups, like you can with an 80 8 with its block of routing buttons at the top of each channel strip. The metering was plasma bargraphs which ran pretty hot. Otherwise it was a nice desk to work on.